The Trouble with Tuck (4 page)

W
e found Dr. Tobin in the pen area of his clinic. Animal patients, large and small, were in their hospital “rooms.” We could hear barks, meows, and chirps. Pens lined each side of the concrete alley, which smelled of disinfectant.

If Dr. Tobin was surprised that we'd come back, he didn't show it.

My father suddenly seemed upset. “What the devil do we do now?” His voice was cutting.

“To be very honest, not much,” said Dr. Tobin.

My mother was also angry. “That's no answer,” she stormed.

Dr. Tobin looked helplessly at her and then at me. “All right, I'll agree that's no answer. I'll give you one. I can put him away, right here. An injection this morning. Now.”

I shouted, “No!”

I'd run away with Tuck before I let them do that.

Dr. Tobin went on talking, quietly and calmly. “Or you can give him to the university at Davis. They're working very hard on retinal atrophy.”

Mother gasped. “Experiment with Tuck? Operate on him? Make him a medical guinea pig, then kill him?”

“If that's how you want to say it,” the doctor answered, with a long, tolerant sigh.

I remember that I wanted to lash out at all three of them until my father, now calm again, said, “We can't even consider that. We love Tuck too much. He's part of our family. He saved Helen's life.”

The doctor started to walk, and we fell in beside him. He stopped in front of a cat cage and took out a patient. The cat's head was entirely bandaged. Only its eyes and nose were visible.

“I'm not forgetting that,” said Dr. Tobin. “But Tuck might make a lasting contribution to veterinary medicine. He might contribute to a cure for all dogs. We don't get that many chances to work on retinal atrophy cases.”

“I'm sorry,” said my father, with finality.

The doctor started to walk again, carrying the cat cra-dled over one shoulder, its eyes peeping out of the gauze. He was stroking its back.

“Absolutely not,” my mother agreed.

I had to speak then. “Dr. Tobin, I'd take him away somewhere before I'd let anyone do that.”

He looked down at me. “Helen, you may be condemning him to a rope for as long as he lives. I'm not sure that's fair. Think about it.”

I didn't know what was fair now. I didn't care.

Dr. Tobin walked into a large room. There was an operating table in there, with straps on it for the animals and a huge light above it. I saw oxygen tanks and those bottles that drip fluid into people or, in this case, animals. I felt uncomfortable in there.

After placing the cat on the table, the doctor began unwinding the head bandage. “Something else you should know. Tuck can turn vicious. He'll live in a world of darkness, and the kind hand that suddenly, unexpectedly touches him can be mangled. He won't expect the touch. Your loving, lifesaving Tuck may bite you. Severely.”

The three of us stood silent.

Dr. Tobin continued, “The worst bite I've ever had came from a loving but very blind black Labrador.”

“You're trying to discourage us,” my father said.

Dr. Tobin smiled. “I'm not succeeding, am I? Okay, on the rope he goes. And you better be prepared to live with it and try to understand it. One dog in a hundred can adjust—can operate solely by smell and sound, in a restricted way. Maybe Tuck can; maybe he can't.”

“How long before we'll know?” my mother asked. “Helen starts school next month, and so do I. Teaching, again.”

Dr. Tobin replied, “I haven't the faintest idea, Mrs. Ogden. Honestly. You'll just have to observe him.”

“But we can't pen him up or put him on a rope now,” my father said. “Tuck has always run free, all year around. He's only in the house when he wants to be.”

The doctor shrugged. “Then you better prepare your-selves for the worst.”

“A car hitting him?” my mother asked.

“The chances will increase each week he runs loose.” By this time, Dr. Tobin had fully unwound the bandage, and we could see that the cat's head was completely bald. There was an ugly red scar crowning the gray skin of the skull.

Dr. Tobin said, “Here's a car victim for you.”

W
henever my mother worked on the flower beds, she usually wore blue corduroys and a faded T-shirt that said, “Arm Bears. Don't Bear Arms.” She was cultivating her marigolds and petunias at this moment, digging into the rich brown earth with a metal claw. We hadn't been home from Dr. Tobin's too long.

Mother always worked around her flowers when she was upset, claiming the fragrance and bright colors of the blossoms and the feel of the damp earth helped chase per-sonal clouds away. I watched her awhile and then went inside, Tuck padding along behind me.

My father was in the den at the desk, his fingers gliding over the old adding machine. He paid all the bills in our house, being good at math.

The furniture in that room was white wicker covered in a flower print, but my favorite was a large white rocking
chair from Hickory, North Carolina, where my grandmother lived. I sat down on it, and Tuck flopped down on the large oval braided rug on which the chair rested.

I had a lot on my mind, and rocking always helped.

I asked my father, “What's it like to be blind?”

I couldn't see him but could hear his voice.

“Terrible, I guess.”

I was curious about something else. “Is it better to be born blind or go blind later?”

He didn't speak right away. Finally he said, “Helen, I can't answer your question. I just don't—”

Then the phone rang in the kitchen, and Stan yelled, “Dad, telephone.”

Saved by the bell, he left the room, while I kept rocking, thinking that if it were me, I'd much rather go blind later on. Then I would have seen everything, known exactly how things looked and what the colors were. Of course, color didn't matter to Tuck at all. I'd learned long ago that all dogs are color-blind.

Stan edged into the room. He said, “Hey, Sis, Mom told me about Tuck and what happened at the vet's this morning. I'm sorry. I really am. I've done a lot of kidding about you and that dog, but I love him too.”

I looked up at my towering oldest brother and nodded.

Then he knelt down to pet Tuck, rubbing under his front leg-pits where he always liked to be rubbed.

“So, if you want to go off somewhere, I'll sit with him.”

That bothered me, although I'm not sure why. I looked straight at Stan and said, “He doesn't need ‘sitting with,’ like a baby.”

“Well, I made the offer,” he said, and departed.

I relented and yelled after him, “Thanks.”

Then Luke came into the room with his soccer ball. He dropped it and sat on it, balancing in the doorway while he talked.

He said, “Helen, I'll help you walk him if you want me to.”

Suddenly these two household males, who gave me a loving but bad time most of the time, were being nice to me. It was all because of Tuck.

I made a grunting noise and kept on rocking.

Luke asked, “Are his eyes going to turn funny? White? Or will they be gooshie gray?”

“No one knows,” I said.

Luke said, “That blind man who runs the newsstand at the post office has gooshie gray eyes.”

That was awful. “Luke, do you need to talk about it?”

He said, “I gotta go,” and picked up his soccer ball.

I rocked some more and decided to go up to my room. I wanted to try something. Tuck got up and followed.

I wanted to know exactly how Tuck would feel when he had to go everywhere and see nothing. I realized that he would have an advantage over me because he could smell things I couldn't. Who else but a dog can smell a dove? I also assumed that his hearing was much better than mine. He could hear sirens long before I heard them.

Inside my room, I closed my eyes very tight and began to walk around, bumping first into my bed and then into my chest of drawers. I refused to open my eyes, no matter the bumps. Suddenly I tripped over Tuck and hit the floor, and then my eyes opened wide.

My mother was standing in the doorway with folded arms and raised eyebrows, monitoring me. She asked, “Helen, just what in the world were you doing?”

“Trying to see how Tuck would feel.”

“He might feel a lot better if you didn't step on him.”

I said, “I had my hands out to feel my way around.” Then I added stupidly, “Tuck doesn't have hands.”

“Most dogs don't,” my mother said. “Stan just came out in the yard to tell me he thought you were cracking up. I hope you're not.”

I was not about to crack up and said so. Or maybe I was already cracked up.

Monday morning, I did something that I seldom did in summer—I got up early. My father awakened me after his alarm clock in the master bedroom went off, and I dressed hurriedly. It was six-thirty.

Tuck was already at the back door when I came down, and my mother let him out, as usual. But this time, he had a follower—me!

I waited a moment and then went on his trail, hoping that he wouldn't be aware I was behind him. There wasn't any wind blowing, so whatever odor I had wasn't wafting up toward him.

Wanting to see how he navigated by himself every day, I made up my mind not to call him or let him know I was around unless it was absolutely necessary.

Tuck moved surefootedly along the sidewalk and grass strip as if he had 20/20 vision, going at a slow trot up Cheltenham, stopping frequently to sniff and leg lift. There were royal palm trees with thick trunks in the strip, and he seemed to know exactly where they were. Maybe he had radar in his head?

He went for half a block without hitting anything, but the DeFords, at 816, hadn't taken in their empty garbage
cans from the trash pickup, and I watched as Tuck plowed into one, head on. It rolled and banged in the dawn.

He stopped and seemed to be staring at it, then sniffed it and went around. More than anything else, he seemed to be embarrassed at knocking it over.

Denham Boulevard was the next cross street over, and I was tempted to call him as he reached the curb there. Early morning traffic was already zooming by on Den-ham. He paused and seemed to be listening to it as the cars whined past us.

I held my breath. Would he do it?

At last, he turned away from the curb and went up Denham, as if he weren't sure enough of himself to cross at that hour. Maybe later. I breathed again.

I continued to follow him on up Denham to Wickenham, the street that paralleled ours. He made a right turn there, and I was running by that time to keep up with him.

Without warning, he dropped off the curb and began to angle across to the other side of Wickenham.

Suddenly I saw a car coming our way, fast.

I yelled at him, and he stopped, turning his head sharply to look back in my direction.

My mother had been right, as had Dr. Tobin.

Our Tuck was living dangerously.

At dinner that night, my mother said to my father, “Now, if you want to go to the lake for Labor Day, let's make the plans. Don't wait until September first.” My uncle Ray had a cabin at Lake Angeles, and we usually went up there for hot dogs and potato salad, swimming and trout fishing.

My father nodded but didn't answer.

I'd been thinking about something all day, ever since seeing Tuck pause at the curb on Denham and then watching that car speed toward him on Wickenham. Maybe I had a solution to Tuck's trouble?

I said to all of them, “You know I have to start school in three weeks. Nobody will be home, and Tuck needs someone to take care of him.”

My mother looked at me uncertainly. “A dog-sitter?”

My father commented, “That's not necessary, Helen. We can't afford that kind of thing. I think he's learning to adjust.”

I'd told my mother about the car on Wickenham in the morning. She muttered, “Learning to adjust to jeopardy.”

“I don't mean a dog-sitter,” I said. “I've been thinking all day about what he needs. He needs one of those dogs that help the blind.”

No one said a single, solitary thing. Silently they all just turned, together, and looked at me as if I were bedbug crazy. Four enemy heads aimed in my direction.

B
ecause I didn't think it would do much good to talk to my family anymore about a helper dog for Tuck, I stopped by Ledbetter's on Tuesday to visit Mr. Ishihara. Always an optimist, he immediately said it was a brilliant idea.

“What can you lose?” he asked.

Nothing at all, I thought.

So, afraid of getting into an argument if I made the call at home, to be overheard and reported on by Luke, I stopped by the public phone booth opposite the doughnut shop at the busy corner of Rosemont and Denham, spending forty cents of my own precious money.

“California Companion Dogs for the Blind, Inc.,” was listed in the white pages.

The woman who answered the phone there switched me to the office of the administrator, a Mrs. Mary Chaf-fey, and in a moment I was talking to Mrs. Chaffey's secretary,
who sounded very businesslike. My goal was to help Tuck, through any means I could.

Without hedging around, I said, “I'd like to make an appointment to talk about a companion dog.”

“Is there someone in your family who is blind?”

“Yes,” I said flatly, knowing full well she thought I was referring to “someone” with two legs.

“You sound awfully young,” said the secretary.

“I'm not that young,” I replied. “I'm thirteen.”

The secretary asked, “Is your mother or father there? You sound as though you're calling from a phone booth.” The traffic was indeed whizzing by. Tuck was sitting patiently just outside the half-open door.

“I am,” I readily confessed. “My parents are home. But they need an appointment. They're too embarrassed to call you.”

Right away, I noticed a marked change in her attitude. I guess she thought they were poor, old, and blind and too proud to call, so their little girl was doing the calling.

She said, softening up, “Oh, my, they shouldn't be too embarrassed to call us. That's what we're here for. What's your last name?”

“Ogden.”

“Tell them five o'clock Thursday. The appointment will be with Mrs. Chaffey. But please phone me back if they can't make it. Do you need transportation? We'll provide that too.”

I said we didn't.

Deciding it would be unwise to announce the arrange-ments at the dinner table, with my brothers around, I told my mother just as soon as I reached home.

“They gave you an appointment?” she marveled, sounding as if she didn't quite believe it.

“It's for you and Dad.”

“And you told them about Tuck?”

For a very good reason, I didn't answer that question directly. I just nodded and said, “They understand about dogs.”

“I guess they do,” my mother agreed. “I'll talk to your father. I'm really surprised.”

That night at dinner, my father laughed about it. He seemed pleased, too. He said, directly to Stan, “See? You want things done, you have to do them yourself.”

Then to me, he said, “What time's the appointment?”

“Five o'clock Thursday.”

Under the table, I crossed my fingers in the special way, two over one on each hand.

Stan said, shaking his head, “I would've bet anything they'd tell her to drop dead.” Luke wasn't at home, or he surely would have said something similar.

Mother chided Stan. “It's a well-known charitable organization, and I'm sure they don't go around telling anyone to drop dead.”

Stan shrugged.

For the next two days, I thought mostly about that school for companion dogs out in San Carlos. I wondered what the school charged for the dogs. What kind they'd be. How old. If I had to give up my entire allowance until I went to college, that would be perfectly okay. But I thought that once they took a look at Tuck, they'd be glad to give me a dog free of charge. Occasionally, as Luke
said, I built things up in my mind. Everything was rosy when I did that.

On Thursday, my father came home about a quarter to four, since it took an hour to reach San Carlos, a little town out in the country in another county, with a lot of dairy farms around it.

Waiting in the driveway for his two beeps, I rehearsed myself. Then up he rolled, and I said, “I have something to tell you,” the moment he unwriggled from the small car.

His eyes narrowed. He could always guess when I was about to make a confession. He listened and then sighed. “Now, why did you have to do it that way?”

“Because I thought the school might not even talk to me unless I told a white lie.”

He shook his head with disappointment and said, “It wasn't so white,” then went on inside.

In the station wagon, waiting for them, I said to Tuck confidently, “We're about to solve your problem.”

In a few minutes we were on our way. I was in the back seat, of course, with Tuck, staying silent, crossing my fin-gers and doing some praying. I'd done a lot of double fin-ger crossing in my lifetime but not so much praying.

After a while, my mother turned to me to say, “I'm still surprised they gave you an appointment.”

Observing me in the rearview mirror, my father said tartly, “I'm not.”

“I don't understand,” Mother said.

“She told them you and I were ‘too embarrassed’ to make the call. She also told them that ‘someone’ in the family was blind. She didn't say
who.
I also get the
impression that the school thinks we might be indigent, since they offered us transportation.”

I shut my ears.

My mother looked first at my father, then at me. “When did you learn about all this, Tony?”

“She confessed ten minutes ago.”

My mother swung her full attention back to my father. “Why didn't you tell me? Now I am embarrassed. They'll throw us out.”

I pushed farther back into the seat.

Father said, “We're committed. We might as well try now.”

Mother glanced at him once again and then back at me, her eyes bleak. “Helen!”

I silently set my jaw, determined to let nothing bother me. The most important thing on earth was Tuck. Not them. Not me. Just Tuck.

Finally, several miles out of San Carlos, where dairy farms were scattered around low rolling hills, we saw a big wooden sign with a full-sized black Labrador painted on it. “California Companion Dogs for the Blind, Inc.” was lettered above the inky Lab, marking an open gateway. We drove through it.

The moment the car engine was turned off, we could faintly hear many dogs barking but we couldn't see them. In a pretty setting of lawn and shade trees and pathways, there seemed to be a half-dozen low gray-shingled buildings, across from a parking lot.

We sat for a moment, just looking around.

“If it weren't for all the dogs barking, you'd think it was any good private school,” my father said.

“It certainly isn't your average private school,” my
mother said, nodding toward a green van that had just pulled up to the entrance.

Six or seven blind people, with their companion dogs, stepped from the van and began walking up a pathway toward one of the bungalows. We could hear them laughing and talking, the dogs moving along with them.

A troubled look creasing his face, my father turned to me. “Helen, this place is for humans with catastrophic problems.”

I clamped my jaws. Nothing was going to change my mind.

My mother said, “Are you really sure you want to go in there?”

I took a long time to answer, then said, “Tuck has a catastrophic problem too.”

“Okay,” sighed my father, reaching for the door handle.

I advised Tuck, “We won't be too long,” and got out too.

My mother said bitingly, “That's an understatement.”

Just inside the door to the administration building was a fat black Labrador with a graying chin and whiskers. His tail was wagging as we went inside, stopping a moment to pet him.

The receptionist said, “Henry is our greeter dog. He's ten years old and retired.”

I thought to myself, That's the very kind of dog we need. Being ten, he'd had a lot of experience. He'd be perfect to guide Tuck around. But since he was the “greeter dog,” I doubted that he was for sale.

My father asked for Mrs. Chaffey, and we were directed down the wide hallway. There were several other older dogs lolling around, sleeping in the hallway or padding
down it. In fact, retired companion dogs seemed to be plentiful, and I was now almost certain we'd drive away with one.

In a moment, we were ushered into Mrs. Chaffey's office. Dressed in a white blouse, riding breeches, and boots, she was a tall, slender woman with silver-gray hair and silver bracelets on her right wrist. Smiling, she asked us to sit down, explaining that she was going riding in a little while. “We keep a few horses here. It's the right country for it.”

I looked around her office. On one wall were large photos of four different types of dogs. On another wall was a huge blackboard labeled, “Area Status.” Names of dogs and people were on it, along with dates. From outside, we could hear all the yelping.

Mrs. Chaffey glanced toward the window. “It's feeding time, and they're always noisy for that. But they're aw-fully good at night. We have a big population here. More than three hundred at all times, of all ages. German shepherds, Labrador retrievers, black and golden Labradors. Those types make the best companion dogs, we've found.”

My father said, hesitatingly, “The blind people we saw when we came in, are they …”

“Students,” she said. “We take them to nearby towns or the city six days a week, with the dogs. It's very rou-tine. They're here for twenty-eight days of intensive training with the companions we've selected for them. Then they graduate.” She paused.

“Now, how can we help you, Mr. Ogden?”

My father was visibly embarrassed. He said, “Ah, well. Well, ah. Do you ever sell any of these dogs?”

“Oh, my, no. Never. We breed them here. Send them to farm families for more than a year for human contact, then bring them back and train them, and finally lend them to blind people.”

“There's no charge?” my mother asked.

“None at all,” replied Mrs. Chaffey. “We're entirely supported by public donations and endowments.”

Then she looked at my father, trying to get to the point, and asked, “A member of your family is involved?”

I blurted it out. “Yes, my dog, Tuck. He's blind.”

She blinked, and her mouth opened helplessly. In what seemed like forever before she did speak, she looked over at my mother and father. They were squirming.

Then she said, “I—you see—I hardly expected …”

She stopped, cleared her throat, and started over again, looking straight at me. “I'm so sorry to hear that.”

I said, “Isn't there one real, real old one, like Henry, that you could sell us for Tuck? We'll take good care of him.”

Mrs. Chaffey said, “I know you'd take good care of him.” She nodded toward the board. “See the dogs up there, with the masters and mistresses by each name, and the date we graduated those teams?”

I looked up at the board.

“When a dog retires at about the age of eight and is replaced by a younger dog, the retired dog often stays with the blind person's family or goes back to the farm where it lived for a while. Or, in a few cases, retires here like Henry and the others you saw in the hall. They become the pets of staff members.”

“I'd hoped there'd be just one …”

Mrs. Chaffey said, “Helen, our dogs are so very special.
We select only the best, and it costs more than six thou-sand dollars to train each human-dog team. Our contributors would be outraged if we sold a companion dog. You must understand.”

Though I swallowed and nodded, I had to lower my head to hide the deep disappointment. I'd been so certain they'd sell us a dog for Tuck.

Mrs. Chaffey went on. “And, you know, I've never heard of a companion-type dog being teamed with a blind dog. I'm not sure it would work.”

I lifted my head. “Would you like to see Tuck?”

Mrs. Chaffey rose from behind her desk. “I'm fond of all dogs.”

We went out to the car, and I opened the back door. Tuck jumped out, that yellow flag of a tail thrashing around.

I said to Mrs. Chaffey, “This is Friar Tuck Golden Boy. He's three and a half years old.”

Tuck smiled in our direction.

Mrs. Chaffey put her hand to her mouth, as if her breath had been whisked away, murmuring, “He's so beautiful.”

Though Tuck was smiling at her, his eyes were vacant and useless, beginning to turn that “gooshie gray” that Luke had talked about. No wonder she was upset.

“He's a very good dog, too,” I added.

With anguish, Mrs. Chaffey said to my mother and father, “Can't anything be done surgically to help him?”

Father answered, “We've been told, by a very good vet, that there's no hope for that. He advised us to either put Tuck away or give him to the animal medicine school at Davis.”

Mrs. Chaffey shook her head and said, “I wish so much that I could help you.” We could see how distraught she was.

She said to me, “Thank you for letting me meet Tuck. I must go.”

She hurried back into the administration building, and none of us spoke very much on the way home.

My grand idea had fallen apart.