The Early Posthumous Work

An Ironic Dog’s Prospects

3 An Ironic Dog’s Prospects All my early life I was told things were going to change, that who I was as a boy was not who I would be as a man, that nurture was more important than nature. This was nonsense of course. I learned so from a dog. In the Westside Houston neighborhood where I grew up, there were three boys around the same age, and we each had a dog. You could pretty well tell who we were by watching our dogs. Each dog bore not a physical but an uncanny spiritual resemblance to the boy who was his master. One dog was white, one was red, and one was black. The white dog, whose name was Frisky, was not pure white— put a little black and brown around one ear, on his legs, and maybe some on his tail. Frisky was a medium-sized dog with the face of a fox and the temperament of an Englishman. He had a highly developed sense of propriety and prudence, and like any good Tory dog, was at all times ready to say so. He had a strongly developed sense of property, too. This meant that Frisky would yap viciously as you walked up the driveway to his screen porch, and then abruptly shut up and lose interest when it became clear that you were not an intruder. It’s possible he would have done the same thing if you were an intruder —Frisky was prudent to a fault. 4 The Early Posthumous Work His name suited him, because he was frisky, cheerful, with jingling tags and a stiff little body and the bounce in his step that marks some medium and small dogs’ gait. Few things fazed him. He was an optimist. Frisky saw it more or less the way my friend seemed to see it—all was for the best in the best of all possible worlds. In other words, like the family who loved him, Frisky was a Republican. My friend, son of the family and master to Frisky, seemed to move in some world invisible to me, a world which made sense. They had silver napkin rings over there, etched in Old English script with family initials. Oak boards lying around in the garage. We were not alike, really. My friend was even-tempered, friendly, contented. I had for him that awe that the unkempt feel for the well-groomed. How did he do it? Like Frisky, he had confidence. Like all good Republicans he later became a millionaire. The red dog’s name was Fang. Fang was a handsome devil, an Irish setter with long, silky rust-colored fur, long thin legs, tricky brown eyes, and graceful as a cat. He loved to run and to chase things, especially the big squirrels running overhead in the tops of the pine trees which shaded the neighborhood lawns. Fang was a prancer. He would head off at a dead run and then stop abruptly, both front legs thrown out to one side, almost like a horse, leap up again, and tear off in some other direction. We lived not too far from a bayou, and when we went down there, while the other dogs were sniffing along the water’s edge, Fang would splash right on in, then paddle around proudly in the muddy water. We worried about him, but he never had any trouble, and when he got back on the bank he was happy to shake the water out of his long darkened fur, spraying it all over us. As his name suggests, Fang was a free spirit, the neighborhood ’s canine libido. It ran in his family. My childhood friend, like his dog, was never afraid of risks. One wet morning some years later when we were in high school, I was riding with him in a car, heading up a freeway ramp in the rain. I can still hear his voice saying, “Watch this!” as he gunned Steven Barthelme 5 his little convertible, trying to cut in front of another car. We spun across in front of the other driver, off the entrance ramp, slid backward in the mud for twenty feet, and then spun around the rest of the way and fell eight inches or so over the curb onto the access road we had left a few seconds earlier. We looked at each other. Blinked. He...