Rick didn’t like dogs. If he had liked dogs, he would have paid some attention to whether his apartment house accepted dogs before signing a year’s lease and painting the living room wall hunter green in anticipation of an even longer tenancy.
His dad knew he didn’t like dogs—and had probably taken the time to discover that there was a “no dogs” clause in Rick’s apartment lease.
So, why, Rick wondered, did his dad use the most vulnerable moment of their long and stormy relationship to saddle his son with Jack—or with tremendous guilt if Rick had refused to take him?
“One last thing, Rick,” he had said, as Rick dipped his head low to hear what had to be the eleventh last request—none of which had a thing to do with either Rick or his sister, Rachel.
“Sure thing, Dad,” Rick had whispered, being quite sure that his dad would come out of this hospitalization like he’d done several times before and probably would go on ignoring both Rachel and Rick as he had dutifully done since the day their mother had, he continuously claimed, betrayed him and died of cancer.
“Promise me this last thing. I can’t go until I know it’s taken care of.”
“Yes, I promise,” Rick said. But the son had no idea what the father was going to say. Perhaps that he be buried out at the sheep ranch he had loved so much and so hard, certainly more than he’d ever loved another human being, and that had been hard to him in return? Or maybe have his old Jeep bronzed and used as his casket. Rick didn’t really care which. His dad had been little more than an inconvenience and nagging guilt of opportunity lost and relationships gone sour for no reason Rick could fathom for more than a decade. And the son’s only comforting thought on that failure to bond was that Rick knew he had given it more thought and been more concerned about it than his father ever had.
The father loved his dog more than he loved Rick—or Rachel—or even his wife when she was still alive, Rick would have been willing to bet.
“I want you to promise to take Jack. Not to put him down or send him to a kennel. I want you to promise to give him a home and see that he is taken care of—personally.”
That certainly was a bolt out of hell. Rick’s dad knew his son’s circumstance, in a small inner-city apartment. Rick’s experience with his dad’s dog, Jack, was that the hound didn’t even like Rick. Hell, he growled at Rick and kept his body between the son and the father whenever Rick had checked in on his dad and been rebuffed for the effort yet again—giving Rick the impression that the dog thought him capable of patricide. Which, at the moment, if his dad weren’t already dying, seemed a viable choice to Rick.
“Why, Dad? Why not Rachel? She lives on a big spread. It would be what Jack is used to. He’d adjust so much better . . .”
“He can’t stand Rachel. He’d die out of spite,” his dad answered. His voice was weak, though. Rick had to lower his head even farther to catch his words.
Why didn’t I know this about Rachel and the pooch, Rick mused to himself. And how could Jack like Rachel any less than he liked me? How could anyone have told? Did he put Rachel in the hospital? Rick realized at that moment that he had almost as nothing of a relationship with his older sister as he had with his dad. They hadn’t spoken in years—not really spoken, not about anything serious.
That was a depressing thought. Not as depressing and panic edged as the thought of taking his dad’s sheep dog in, though.
“Sure, Dad, I’ll do that. But there’s no reason to be talking about it now. You’ll be fine. The doctors said you’ll recover just fine.”
But his dad wasn’t fine. He died no more than an hour later, defying the doctors to the last. On three previous hospitalizations, the doctors had agreed he couldn’t possibly survive, but he had. And the one time they said his chances were quite good, he died. Rick decided his dad was perverse that way. He’d been spiting Rick like that for years. And he had died without saying another thing. His last thoughts weren’t about the woman he’d lived with for over thirty years or either one of his children—they were about an old sheep dog named Jack.
* * * *
“You can’t keep that dog here. You signed a ‘no dogs’ lease.”
“Suits me,” Rick answered. “As soon as I get my dad buried, I’ll be finding a new home for his dog. Won’t be more than a couple of days. Neither the dog nor I can take this arrangement long, so don’t worry about him being here next week.”
Rick was inching by the apartment super, a stretched muscle-shirt kind of middle-aged guy named Calvin, who was standing out in the middle of the hall in front of the entry door. The door to his first-floor apartment was ajar, revealing a bare room looking more like a gym than a living room and with the TV blaring a professional football game. Calvin was a Neanderthal, who divided his life between ignoring calls to do repairs in the building, using his gym equipment to keep his muscles popping out, and chasing the younger male tenants. He’d been trying to corner Rick, whose apartment was cattycorner at the back of the first-floor hallway from Calvin’s, ever since Rick moved in. He'd made a point to be wearing not much more than briefs and a painfully stretched muscle T on his bulging chest when he encountered Rick in the hall.
“Besides,” Rick turned and said after he’d gotten past Calvin and was sliding down the narrow hallway at the side of the stairs to the upper floors, “the guy in 3B has a yap yap dog that’s been going crazy ever since I moved in.”
“Yeah, well, that guy is friendly,” Calvin said with a grin that more resembled a leer. “He makes it worth my while to have his dog here. If you was to . . .”
“That’s OK, Jack here will be out before the 15th. I just need to get my dad buried first.”
Rick felt like shooting himself for having given Calvin that opening. The best thing to do with the super was to say as little as possible—certainly not get smart-assed with him as Rick had just done—and stay out of his way to the extent possible. Rick did know what Calvin wanted, and although Rick didn’t exactly shy away from getting it on with another guy, he feared Calvin. He was sure the guy had a mean streak—that he could break Rick in two if he wanted to and that he might just look on that as fun. Rick much preferred the corporate types. The ones ten years at least older than he was who were stepping out on their wives but wanting to keep up appearances. The private little weekends at mountain cabins. And the nice presents.
None of that was going to happen, of course, until Rick could unload Jack.
Rick felt a little guilty about doing it, especially as his dad wasn’t even buried yet and he had made a promise. But the way Rick looked at it, the request had been just one last jab in a combative, mean-spirited life. His dad had thrown him out on his tail the minute Rick had mentioned the gay word and had barely spoken to him in the six years that followed.
Rick had had to pull himself up by himself and get his own education and find his own job and establish his own life in the city—rejecting the rural life on the sheep ranch that his dad had relished and that had killed his mother, worn her down with long years of worry on living and prospering to the next year and pulling her full share in keeping the ranch going.
Rick didn’t feel all that forgiving toward his father for that.
Still, he would have felt more guilty if Jack wasn’t such a burden. The dog hadn’t done anything but whine and snuffle at the door, waiting for his master to arrive and rescue him, and turning on Rick and growling at every move he made. It was a battle just getting him leashed and out into the park to relieve himself a couple of times a day. It was a good thing that Rick’s work was within a short walk and he could come home for lunch and to struggle Jack out for a walk, or he’d have had to clean up a mess each evening when he came home. But it had impinged on changed his schedule. Rick was particular about having a rhythm of his life.
The inconvenience—and the ingratitude of the dog—were already crimping Rick’s style, and Jack had only been here three days. And there was Calvin to worry about. Rick didn’t like Calvin having anything over his head. Not at all.
Rick didn’t blame the dog, really—or not much. And he maybe would have blamed and resented him less if he didn’t sense that the dog blamed and resented him even more.
The dog was no dummy. He was a purebred sheltie—related to a border collie. And Rick’s dad had paid big bucks for him so he’d have a dog to do exactly what shelties were good for—herding sheep on an open-range ranch. Until he was retired, when Rick’s dad retired, the dog had been purely an outdoor, open-range work dog, living in the barn and facing up to his routine of sending the sheep out onto the range in the morning, keeping track of them throughout the day, and nipping their heels back to the corral at night. That sheltie and Rick’s dad were more of a devoted couple than his parents had ever been. And Rick’s dad paid more attention to Jack, who had to be more than twelve years old and thus in his dotage now, than Rick and Rachel had ever gotten from the sour-tongued, mean-spirited old coot.
Rick couldn’t deny, however, that Jack had loved his father unconditionally. Rick wasn’t even sure that Jack would outlive his father for long. The dog sat by the door, perking up his ears whenever he heard footsteps out in the vestibule, but quickly realizing it wasn’t his master and sadly lowering his muzzle onto his front legs again and, giving a whine, returning to softly crying his grief.
Through some sixth sense the dog had—and Rick was realizing that Jack was quite intelligent—Rick was sure that the dog intellectually knew his dad was gone. The dog had probably been fully aware of the old man’s deteriorating health over the years, and the few times Rick had visited the ranch in the past two years—now just a collection of rotting sheds and bereft of its livestock and not even belonging to Rick’s family anymore—he had noticed that the dog increasingly had taken on itself the burden of fetching and carrying for the old man and nudging him when it was time for the old man to eat. Rick had gotten the impression that it was truly the old man that the dog was trying to keep going, not prompting him in panic to have the dog’s own needs met.
On the day of the funeral, Jack looked like he was steeped in grief, and Rick heard howling start up from his apartment as soon as he opened the front door to the busy street.
Rick knew Calvin would be waiting for him in the hallway, fish-eyed and nasty, when Rick returned from the funeral. But there wasn’t anything else Rick could do. He couldn’t be everywhere at once, and this was one chore he had to do himself. When he had called Rachel, she asked, with a sigh, how much of a check she needed to send to help cover the final arrangements, and he could almost feel her relax in relief when Rick said there had been enough insurance to cover that.
“So, if you can give me some sort of idea when you can make it East, I’ll settle on a burial date.”
The silence on the phone line was palpable.
“I won’t be coming,” Rachel said at last. “I know that sounds awful. But there it is. I see no reason to be hypocritical about it.” Rachel, the practical one. The hard one. But then Rick didn’t really blame her. She’d had to build a shell to survive the life that had been dealt her. And she’d done all right for herself. The two of them didn’t see much of each other, certainly. But Rick knew that this was mostly because of the rough life they’d shared under their father’s roof. Whenever they met, any chance that they could have enjoyed the visit was wiped out by the memories that crowded in—the wounds threatening to open again. Wounds that they both had worked so hard to close. Things that needed to be said but couldn’t be said.
“That’s OK,” Rick had answered. “If I wasn’t already here, I wouldn’t be coming either.”
The ceremony was short. Rick’s father had no friends—certainly not here in the city. They were less than a hundred miles from the ranch, but the ranch and the city might as well have been on separate planets as far as Rick’s father was concerned.
Rick had a priest friend, and he was happy enough to come out and say a few words over the grave, especially when, upon going through the desk out at the ranch, Rick had found that his father was a practicing Catholic. But other than Rick, standing off from the grave as it was being filled in, and the pitiful little spray of roses he’d remembered to stop and pick up at the last minute, there was no other evidence that Rick’s father had ever lived or had left any sort of positive mark on the world. Rick felt evil, but he gave a little laugh when, standing there, watching the roses get buried under the clods of dirt, he remembered that his father hated roses.
Rick could hear the howling from a block away when he trudged back from the internment. And sure enough, attracted by Jack’s musings, Calvin was waiting for Rick in the front hall, wearing athletic shorts and a tight tank top and a scowl going from ear to ear.
“I told you about the dog.”
“I know. I just buried my dad. I’ll work on getting rid of the dog now.”
Something in the way Rick said it, a sudden hardness to his voice, made Calvin shut his jaw on the next comment he was going to make and back into his apartment and shut the door.
It was the door that Rick noticed first when he entered the apartment. He might have thought that Jack had rabies from the way the dog was flopping all over the living room. Rick had heard the scratching over the howls while he was opening the door, and when he entered the apartment and turned and looked down, he saw that Jack was well on his way to digging through the wood of the door and escaping. Another unpleasant confrontation down the road with Calvin. And all the dog’s doing.
“Stop that, you mutt,” Rick yelled in exasperation.
But Jack kept on howling and flinging himself around the room and returning to dig at the door.
“OK, OK, I’ll take you out to the park,” Rick answered, angry and beside himself. He couldn’t get rid of this burden fast enough.
When he’d gotten Jack leashed and followed him out the front door, barely able to keep him under control, Rick was surprised that Jack didn’t head for the park a block over, which was the only place besides the apartment that Jack knew in this new and strange—and oppressive—environment. Jack was pulling Rick down the street, north rather than south where the park was located.
It took Rick a few moments to catch on, and even then it was only a hunch. The dog couldn’t be that smart, Rick thought. But smart or not, the dog was trying to drag Rick in the direction of the cemetery that Rick had just left.
Resigned, and curious about his hunch, and needing to get Jack out of ear range of Calvin long enough to think about what he’d do with him, how he’d get rid of a dog this old, knowing that he was on the verge of being tossed out on the street himself, Rick pulled Jack over to his car and pushed him into the backseat. The dog seemed less agitated now that something was happening, no doubt, Rick thought, believing that this clod who had kidnapped him had finally gotten the idea that he needed to take Jack home—to his master, who needed him.
While Rick drove, he also began to get calmer—and to formulate and accept the plan of just taking Jack to an animal shelter on the way home. Admitting defeat and bowing to the inevitable. Failing his father once again in the old man’s eyes—but, what the hell. What had his father ever done for him?
When they reached the cemetery, Jack bounded out of the car before Rick could get the leash on him and raced straight for the newly interred grave. Rick stood there, in awe, as he watched Jack stretch out full on top of the freshly laid sod on his father’s grave and bury his muzzle into a loose seam in the sod roll.
Rick heard the dog whimpering, but this wasn’t anything like the frenzy the dog had gone into in the apartment.
Time dragged on. Rick had no idea how long they were out there—Jack flattened against the grave and Rick standing at the car. Waiting. At length Rick heard stifled sobbing and assumed it was the dog. But he was surprised and perplexed to realize that the sobs were his own. He had let his mind wander. He had thought of the dog, Jack, and the depth of emotion that the animal obviously felt for his father. And he began to think that his father must have had a vein of something lovable in him for a dog to mourn him like this. And then his thoughts went to what he’d found in his father’s desk—discoveries that he had steeled himself against until now, had pretended didn’t exist because he didn’t want them to exist. Not just the discovery that his father had been a practicing Catholic, but evidence as well that he cared for people—had contributed to charities. Had paid for gifts for both Rick and Rachel that they had convinced themselves had come only from their mother. Had paid tuition bills for Rick that he hadn’t even realized he had owed. And the packet of letters. The love letters between his parents, his father’s words so poetic and loving.
Rick was crying full bore now, grieving belatedly, but grieving still. Not his father’s son in that regard. Still able to grieve and to mourn opportunities lost. Not stone-hearted.
He took a handkerchief out of his pocket and was using it to blot the tears in his eyes. Closing his eyes. Wanting to shut the world out; somehow embarrassed that he was standing out here bawling—even though this was the one place where anyone could be forgiven such a lowering of defenses.
He felt a cold wetness at the hand that had been dangling at his side, and he jerked the hand to the side. But the cold wetness followed his hand, and Rick opened his eyes in time to see Jack nudge his muzzle into the palm of his hand. Rick knelt down and hugged the dog close—the first time Jack had let him anywhere near—and the dog responded by burrowing his nose into the crook of Rick’s elbow.
After several minutes, Rick stood up and opened the door to the backseat of the car and whispered, “Come on, boy. Let’s go home.”
Jack jumped into the backseat and turned and sat down like a potentate awaiting the start of the parade, and Rick sighed and climbed into the front seat.
* * * *
Rick had gotten drunk at the bar—drunker than he had intended to get. He had to remember not to go out to the bars when he was feeling lonely and horny. It hurt—he was getting shafted good. The stud on top of him was hung; he was stretching Rick and taxing his passage. But it’s what Rick wanted, what he’d asked for.
What was his name? Rick couldn’t remember. He was letting a stranger fuck him on his bed and he didn’t even know the guy’s name—or if he ever had even asked the stud’s name. He was a stud, though. Good-looking and hung. All Rick knew was that he’d been lonely and hadn’t had a sexual relationship for some time. He hadn’t let anyone get close to him for a couple of years. He wasn’t that keen on having a relationship, but he had gone out this evening wanting sex.
Now he was having sex—or at least a hung stud was using him for sex.
He was on his belly, cheek to mattress, staring out into the bedroom. Jack was sitting there, patiently, beside the bed, watching the big bruiser fuck him. The pillows were under his belly, elevating his pelvis, and the guy was on top of him, doing pushups on his ass, stretching him inside with a monster cock. The stud was doing all of the work. Rick was just lying there and letting the stud have what he wanted.
Jack had been patient, but he’d growled when Rick cried out at the first penetration. Rick was afraid that if he mouthed off as he was pressed to do at the working of the thick cock inside him, Jack would get the wrong idea and attack the guy on top of Rick. So, Rick did what he could to stifle his moans as “whoever he was” mined his ass.
Rick’s arm was dangling off the side of the bed and Jack scooted up to it on his rump and licked Rick’s hand, seeking assurance that Rick didn’t mind the guy mounted on his ass and fucking him in vigorous strokes. Rick smiled at Jack and petted him on the head. That seemed to reassure the dog, who scooted back away from the bed, but never turning, not taking his eyes off Rick—until they heard the knocking on the apartment door.
“Rick, you home? Let’s say you let me in and we’ll watch the Laker’s game together—and, you know, fool around a little bit.” The voice was Calvin’s, the apartment super, and he sounded drunk—drunker than Rick was when he let this guy on top of him come home with him and lay him. That’s what Calvin wanted too. He didn’t make much of a secret of it. He wanted to lay Rick. Rick shouldn’t have let Calvin lay him the previous week, but he had, thinking he had no other choice at that moment.
Jack left the room now, turning and running into the living room, barking and jumping up on the door to the hallway. Jack didn’t like Calvin. He didn’t like Calvin one bit. The knocking stopped and Calvin must have retreated.
Good dog, Rick thought. There were certain times when having a dog was just the ticket. Jack came back into the room, settled down, and went back to looking into Rick’s eyes for assurance that everything was OK.
The big bruiser fucked on. Rick was getting close and got more into the rhythm of the fuck. He turned into the missionary position, the shaft losing position for only a few seconds, hugged the stud's hips close with his knees, clutched the man's biceps and set his pelvis in motion, going with the thrusts. The stud grunted the rise in his cum as well. Jack whined but remained where he was in the last frenzied moments of Rick and the stud riding each other hard and coming together.
