The Dog Coalie

Somewhere in the family memorabilia is a picture of me when I was around three years old, wearing coveralls, no shirt, standing barefoot on a towel, holding a star wrench. It seems obvious from the picture that I believed that I was changing the tire on our war-grey Packard. I stood on the towel, I’m told, because of the hot sand. Visible in the picture is the shadow of the photographer, my mother I think, and next to her, also watching me, the rounded shadow of a dog.

We lived in a tent in the desert, is my earliest memory. Nowadays it seems to me that it was a medium sized military tent—what I would have called a squad tent when I was in the army—about 30 feet long, not quite half as wide. The plastic windows were so scarred and brittle with age that they barely let in the light. In warmer weather they were rolled and tied, and a mesh screen let in both the air and the view. I don’t remember how the kitchen worked, or if we had heat, or where we got our water. Those things practical to camp living were not yet in my universe.

Mostly it was my mother and my father. More her than him, because at this time he was away at work all day and she wasn’t. More than her, though, was Coalie, the mutt. Coalie was black, weighed probably 50 pounds or less, had medium long wavy black fur all over her hard little body, and a splash of white somewhere on her front. Time dims this memory, yet there was a certain dog-smell about her that still resides in me, and I have thought of her often over the years.

Deserts are almost never as flat as they appear. You can walk out of sight in seconds on what seems to be a table top. The great Sonoran Desert in southwestern Arizona was my yard. Rock-littered arroyos fanned the broad, gentle slope that, to the uninitiated, looked like flat ground. A shallow sandy hill near the tent was spotted frugally with creosote and cacti, a few other varieties of narrow leafed brush, but no actual trees.

Coalie was my buddy, my protector, my companion. Put another way, I was her pup. I was allowed to wander pretty much at will so long as Coalie was with me, and when I went somewhere, she took it upon herself to be with me. She was distressed when I was out of her sight—she actually had snapped at both my mother and father when, one day, they jokingly tried to keep her from following me as I trekked out of our campsite.

So long as I was with Coalie, I was allowed to wander from the camp at will. When mother wanted me to come back to camp she would put her hands together in a way that created a sort of ocarina, and blow across her thumbs. She could actually play a few notes this way, and the sound carried pretty far in the desert. When Coalie heard this signal she would nose me around to distract me from whatever I was doing, and I knew to come home. It was always easier to just come home than it was to resist her nose.

Memories of Coalie reside in a fundamental store of templates inside me: her smell, the coarse fur of her shoulder, the soft fur on her belly, her wet, insistent nose and lapping tongue, her intense, blinking black eyes.

The arroyos. She and I were playing in a sandy wash that was lined with a wall of boulders, dotted with plants that smelled warm and sweet when I twisted the leaves. Small caves in the bank of the wash interested me, because lizards often lived in them, and the dirt was cool and sometimes even moist. The caves intrigued Coalie for her own doggie reasons. I decided to walk across the flat bottom of the sandy wash, toward a stand of creosote, maybe to look for lizard sign or tarantula tracks. Coalie exploded past me with a deliberate bump of her shoulder, I fell to the sand with a yelp. I got to my feet in time to see Coalie snatch up a huge snake, much longer than my entire body. She was growling, whipping her head so vigorously that her paws cleared the ground. The snake’s pale yellow belly flashed. I could hear its running ends snap like little whips. After a few seconds she threw the limp form to the ground, where it lay still. She growled at it, then grabbed it up again, shook it again, threw it down again.

She looked at me, panting—her black eyes glowed. Do you understand? Do you understand?

I got it. She picked the snake up and shook it again, then paused, watching me out of the corner of her eye. I stepped back. She dropped the snake. I approached the snake, and she let me look at it, but she wouldn’t let me touch it. I squatted beside the snake, my little hands to my chest, and we looked at it together. It didn’t have a mark on it. Its broad head seemed distorted, its gaping lower jaw was rubbery, as though it had no bones. I leaned toward the snake; Coalie groaned, a sound like a rusty nail being pried out of a dried plank. I leaned back into my squat. After a while we went elsewhere play. Coalie was a good teacher.

Later back at the tent I told mother that Coalie killed a snake. Mother nodded and said, yes, Coalie does that from time to time. She asked me if it was a big one, and I said yes, very big. How big? This big: I stretched out my hands, but I knew it was longer than that, so I waved my arms like a bird flying. This big, and this big. I could see the snake belly flashing in the sun, head and tail popping like little whips, sand flying from Coalie's paws. Bad snake, I said. Coalie lay near my feet with her head on her crossed paws, her black eyes flashing between me and my mother as we talked. Mother nodded. Yes. Bad snake. Coalie’s tale thumped softly on the sand a few times. She closed her eyes.