Queer God Worship: Good Girl
“I want it all to go back. All eight years. Back to the first bite”
Fiction by Brian Tibbetts
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We were waiting together, me, Gaia. Waiting outside while my ex-wife Pinky’s old friend Sarah closed the deli for the evening. Sarah had moved to Bend to get away from an abusive situation with her ex-husband and in the couple of years that she’d been there, she’d found love, quit Whole Foods, gotten knocked up, had to put both of her aging dogs down, and gotten engaged. She’d had really good…well, as good as could be expected, experiences with the vet that she’d found in Bend to put her dogs down. Good enough, that we had traveled several hours, myself from Portland, and Gaia and Pinky from Seattle, to put Gaia down at the same vet.
Gaia could tell something was up. I could tell she could tell by the heightened nervous tension that animated her pacing on the deck outside the deli. We’d been sitting together at the curb, but the deli was right across the street from a doggy daycare. Every time someone came out the door with a dog in tow, or pulled up with a dog in the car, Gaia pulled her standard freak-out. Even at a distance of a hundred or so yards, this caused problems, maybe not the barking so much as the twisting against the leash, trying to slip loose of her collar. So, I pulled her up to the partially fenced in deck to pace and wait.
I didn’t know Gaia her whole life. But, she was still my dog. I took her on. I took part in trying to train her, trying to undo what had been done before I came on. I lived with her off and on through the majority of her life, eight of her twelve years. And it had been a good life. And she’d gotten better in several ways. And I forced Pinky’s hand on what to do finally about Gaia, her brain unraveling as her chin whitened, her fear of people and dogs deepening, her aggression toward everyone but a handful of initiates worsening. It was not entirely my fault that we were in Bend, not entirely my fault that we were on the deck of the deli, and not entirely my fault that we were waiting. But, I had a hand in raising her.
I met Gaia not long after my Pinky and I began dating. Gaia was four years old already and possessed a talent for intimidation, if her mother was present. If her mother was present, she would watch you, quiet, in that slunk-down way that says to the initiated, “I will fucking bite you.” When I say “mother” in this context, I mean Pinky, who referred to the two dogs and multiple cats we would have in common over our eight years together as her, “furry children.” Gaia was a good girl, an Albuquerque ditch dingo, brought home from the breeder as an allegedly purebred, brindled pitbull puppy. It turns out that some other dog, most likely the breeder’s neighbor’s unfixed Doberman, somehow got under the fence. Because Gaia was somewhat different, though several of her littermates were clearly pits.
Gaia had, what her mother liked to call, “bat ears.” And, though her stripes faded somewhat as she reached maturity, you could still see the brindle under her tan coat in direct light. Gaia weighed about sixty pounds and was no taller at the shoulder than your average pit bull. She was a bit leaner through the chest and head than a pit, a bit longer in the legs and lankier in general, with the elongated snout of a Dobie, which she somehow managed to transform into the clownish smile of a pitbull whenever she panted. The first time she bit me, I almost didn’t notice; she was that sneaky about it.
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Pinky and her friend finished cleaning up the deli and came outside to join me in what was my third cigarette in twenty-five minutes. The walk from the deli to the vet was only a couple of blocks and we still had about a half-hour until our appointment. It was half-jokingly suggested by one of us that we get a drink at the bar next door to the doggie day car across the street before heading up the block, but the idea of putting the dog back in the car for a half-hour, shut that down. Instead we stood there, smoking on the sidewalk across from the bar, Gaia flipping out anytime another dog emerged from daycare, Pinky alternating between attempts at correcting Gaia’s behavior, exasperation at said behavior and making small talk with her friend and me.
Eventually, we only had ten minutes to kill and it was decided that we would walk Gaia the last block or so to the vet’s while Sarah followed in her car, on the unspoken off-chance that either or both of us would be so wiped out after the experience that we would need a lift to get the one block back to our cars. We walked, the dog between us, up the sidewalk. Gaia hanging her head now, no other dogs around, and clearly smelling the beginning of our mixed emotions hanging in the air around us.
As we approached the front door of the clinic, we automatically broke into our standard paranoid formation: Pinky scouting ahead to make sure no other dogs were in the waiting room, me breaking off with Gaia to a reasonable distance away from the door, in case another dog came out unexpectedly. We’d grown accustomed to our paranoia to the point that noticing this irony was a surprise to me, augmented by the early experience across from the doggie daycare, as it was. Pinky ducked her head out, tears in her eyes already and gave the “all clear” and I brought Gaia in.
The second time Gaia bit me was much like the first time, except for my reaction to it. Both incidents occurred during the first weekend I spent at Pinky’s condo in Tigard, when Gaia was four years old, when we were first getting together. The incidents happened within two hours of each other and in the exact same manner, just far enough apart in time that I didn’t anticipate it happening again and reacted instead of making sure I was ready to intercept. Both times I was following Pinky out onto her back porch to smoke. Both times Gaia had slunked down between two pieces of furniture to the point where she was almost unnoticeable, as if she were just a low-eyed, watching, sulking fixture of the living room. Both times Gaia came up behind me and caught me with just enough pressure to make a mark, but not break the skin on the back of my knee.
The first time it took a full two steps for it to register that she’d bit me; and I almost questioned whether or not it had been her. Because when I looked back, she was right where she had been, staring sullenly up at me, as if she hadn’t moved. After a few minutes on the porch, smoking, I mentioned to my host that her dog had nipped at me. She was at first shocked and embarrassed, but upon seeing the site and nature of the injury said something to the effect of, “Yeah, she does that. Next time just smack her.”
So the next time, though it still took me a couple of strides to realize that it had happened again, I did just that. I turned around and walked right back to Gaia and smacked her across the face, not hard, but hard enough to get the point across that there would be consequences to biting me. I’d never slapped a pitbull, or any dog for that matter, before. I’d had cats my entire adult life, and though I’d chased them around the house on occasion for their various cat affronts: record collection used as a scratching post, Achilles tendon bitten for walking past the wrong chair, etc., I’d never caught one of them and don’t know what I would’ve done if I had (besides getting shredded for my trouble).
Gaia’s reaction to me smacking her was unpleasant, though not terribly surprising in retrospect: she slunked down even farther. And when she bit me the third time (same circumstances), and I turned immediately to slap her again, she cowered and I though, “okay, that’s taken care of,” and I slowed my hand enough that I ended up patting her on the jaw instead of smacking her. And though she winced with every pat, she never bit me again.
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The waiting room at the Vet’s office in Bend was a wholly unremarkable as every other Vet’s waiting room I’ve ever been in: wood paneling or neutrally painted walls, digital pet scale in the corner, somewhat comfortable chairs, cute animal posters, scary heartworm animal posters, old magazines, a potted plant. The fact that we needed to weigh Gaia seemed odd and insulting to me, though it did remind me that this was the one-and-only visit Gaia would ever make to this place. We’d completed all the necessary paperwork in advance, including our testimony regarding Gaia’s track record of escalating aggressive behavior. We wrote about the time she’d hidden in the car, quiet, watching a little girl in a gravel parking lot in French Glen play with her toy poodle until I opened the passenger door and then, without a sound, she was out the door and across the lot, shaking that little white puff ball like it was a chew toy, until the poodle expressed its anal glands right inside her mouth. We wrote about every friend, roommate and doggie daycare worker who had been nipped or outright bitten. We wrote about the work we’d both done with her over the years to try to overcome the fact that she wasn’t socialized to either people or animals (other than cats) until she was four. And we wrote about the last incident, the one that had led me to tell Pinky that Gaia wasn’t welcome at my place in Portland anymore, because she was getting more fearful, more aggressive in her old age, and I didn’t trust her around my kids any more.
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When we meet the veterinarian who would be administering the medication to Gaia, I immediately hate her. She seems like a nice person, and though it would be easiest to hate Pinky in this windowless room at the back of the vet clinic in Bend, hating her for getting us here brings it a little too close to what I could’ve done, could’ve done better, could’ve kept from doing, over the eight years I’d know Gaia, than I can handle at the moment.
The vet is no more or less overweight than I am, her hair is no more or less curly than mine was before it fell out, she’s no more friendly nor professional than the situation warrants. And yet I hate her fat body stuffed in her cobalt-blue scrub pants, and flowery white scrub top. I hate her curly hair. Who the fuck has curly hair? I hate her smile, her professionalism. I hate the air in the room. The overstuffed Costco dog bed in the center of the floor, the pillows they’ve thoughtfully provided for us, the way the procedure is explained, the needle, Sarah thoughtfully waiting in the lobby, the people who drove past us earlier, when we took Gaia for a walk, her last fucking walk, out in the high desert sage. Hated how they got to drive past us, hated how normal their day was, just hated everything.
When the first needle goes in, the one that’s supposed to make it seem all-better, I am sitting on my thoughtfully-provided pillow alongside the overstuffed Costco dog bed. Gaia is standing and looking over my shoulder and I have my arms locked around her, keeping her head over my shoulder so the vet doesn’t get bit. Pinky is sitting adjacent to us on her thoughtfully-provided pillow, stroking Gaia’s flank, trying to keep her calm as the vet slides the needle into a vein just above the hock on Gaia’s back leg. Gaia twitches a little, but the vet is either so good with the hypodermic, or Gaia is so resigned to taking her emotional queues from us that she makes no attempt to fight or fly.
We settle in for a few minutes to wait for the sedative to take hold. Gaia spends this time alternating between trying to get me to understand that the door is right over there and we should probably think about getting the fuck out of here soon before something bad happens, and trying to get Pinky to stop crying. Gaia’s behavior and the supportive watchfulness of the vet combine to make time drag even slower than it already has been and the “few minutes” we were supposed to wait for the sedative to kick in seem like at least a half-hour.
Finally Gaia calms down enough that, although she doesn’t fall asleep, as we’d been led to hope, she does lay down, her head in my lap. The vet takes this as a sign and moves in with the second and final injection. I grab hold of Gaia’s head just in case. And though Gaia does try to turn her head toward the offending pinprick, she doesn’t try to get up until the needle has been removed from the same vein. Gaia gets to her feet, groggy from the sedative but not wobbly yet, and goes over to her mother. She licks the tears from Pinky’s face and the snot from her upper lip, Pinky sitting there paralyzed, her hands wadded-up in the useless Kleenex in her lap. Gaia comes back to me then, though I wasn’t there when she tore up every book in the house as a puppy, wasn’t there for tick time, every afternoon in the Albuquerque summer of her first two years, wasn’t there in love so much as in discipline and irritation, wasn’t there for her, am not there for her now. I am there for myself. I am there to bear witness. There to attempt, in some small way, to own the hand I had in all of this, to own my failures and my scant successes with a troubled dog not of my own making.
Gaia sits in front of me and licks my tears, rest her head on my shoulder again, and half collapses in my lap. The tears are running down my face, attaching to the hairs on my chin and dripping onto her head. I continue to pet her, Pinky reaches over and pets her as well. I say, “Gaia’s a good girl.”
“Gaia’s a good girl.”
“It’s okay, girl, almost over now.”
But she doesn’t die. She just lays there, breathing weird for way too fucking long.
“Gaia’s a good girl.”
“That’s a good girl.”
The vet comes over with the last shot, the one we were warned we might need, the one Pinky will take a sort of pride in later. The vet sticks the needle into the same spot. Gaia twitches, but I make no attempt to restrain her.
“That’s a good girl, almost done now.”
She stops breathing. Then she starts again and I want to take it all back. I want it all to go back. All eight years. Back to the first bite. And the second. And the third.
When we get outside, the sky is same blue as it was before, the indifferent cars drive past on indifferent streets, the drinks at the bar across from the deli, next to the doggie daycare are cold and strong, the regulars seemed to have put the word out among themselves, some of them having seen us walk one way with Gaia and come back the other with a leash and an empty collar. We are pretty much left alone.
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