When my father was a boy, he had a three-legged dog-named “Pud.”
Pud was missing his left, front limb, having lost the appendage in what the old man vaguely referred to as “a croquet mishap.”
My father had only recently arrived in the United States and having a pet like this afforded him even more notoriety in the small, rural Pennsylvania town he and his Spanish family had chosen as a new home than he would naturally warrant.
As if Pud’s mere appearance wasn’t enough to arouse the curiosity of the locals, he made sure his presence was certainly noted by siring not one, but two litters of pups within a matter of months. The country bitches had no idea what hit them.
My father, who told this story often, seemed quite proud of Pud’s sense of immediacy and focus. It was as if Pud was not only somehow representative of my father’s family’s strong Spanish pride, but was in fact related to them; like some long lost three-limbed cousin who was so full of testosterone, as evidenced by his outrageously thick coat of body hair, that he totally lacked any sense of self control and, as he was Spanish, was considered all the more sexy for it. If he were human, the town’s men would riotously applaud him before he was hung.
My grandfather, who I never met, lived a - according to my father - strange, illustrious and complicated life filled with sex and debauchery, not unlike Pud.
He died quite young, at 44 in fact. The family had always unanimously agreed that he was felled by lung cancer. However, presented with even a brief summary of the man’s life one would easily deduce that it was entirely more likely that the true cause of his early departure was the bug that conquered the Roman Empire rather than the illness that struck down the Marlboro Man.
Regardless, before leaving this planet for the Great Orgy in the Sky, he had the foresight to bring the whole brood to the U.S., having had a very influential friend pull a few strings in order to make sure the entire Navas brood was able to come over as one.
Through World War I and into the 1920’s, my grandfather was the linguist to the King
of Spain. He had mastered the major European languages at an early age, and then went on to learn many Arabic and Turkish dialects. These tools made him a very valuable asset to a kingdom that dealt with equal frequency with the rest of Europe as with the nations of Northern Africa and the Middle East.
According to family legend, at each stop on his diplomatic trail he planted a seed, but not necessarily in the tradition of Johnny Appleseed, really more like Pud.
Unfortunately, due to politics, politics, politics, as my grandfather’s haughty reputation began to grow as swiftly and unstoppably as a lesion on the fatty cerebellum of a gigolo linguist, his value to the kingdom as a connective commodity decreased in kind.
His removal from the governmental hierarchy seemed imminent, and so he began to consider a proposition he had received from one Thomas Alva Edison, a well-established American inventor who, some years earlier, had contacted him with a plan to produce the very first instructional language recording.
My grandfather decided to take Edison up on the offer. He had long been thinking of abandoning an increasingly volatile King, and the United States seemed as good a place as any to settle, especially since he’d heard from a fellow traveling sex-maniac friend of his that while in Europe or Africa or the Far East one might have to travel hundreds if not thousands of miles in order to commune with women of different colors and ways, in the U.S., a man need not walk more than a block to sample the earth’s rich bounty of female flesh. He pictured America as Heaven’s Apple Grove; each tree hanging heavy with breasts and lips of all flavors; Golden Delicious for he with a Swedish yearning, Red Rome’s if one lusted for a taste of Italy, Granny Smiths for, well… you know.
My grandfather knew that getting the whole family of three boys, three girls, a wife, and an amputee dog with unstoppable sperm across the Atlantic in one fell swoop was going to take a little finagling, since even back then in the nation’s formative years, U.S. Immigration was already beginning to establish and hone it’s policy of avoiding extending too open an invitation to any person burdened with the misfortune of being even slightly brown.
To make matters worse, one of my Dad’s sisters was in fact his half-sister, and in an abstract but genealogically sound way, also his aunt.
My grandfather had somehow managed to impregnate his wife and his wife’s mother within a six-month period. You can imagine how complicated birthday parties were. Until they learned the basics of human reproduction, the two half-sisters thought they were just strangely spaced twins. This could have remained little more than a deeply scarring family secret were it not for the fact that this blip could end up posing a serious threat to the smoothness of the tribe’s move.
U.S. Immigration and Naturalization policy required proof of legitimacy regarding all children coming in, so a lie of some sort would have to be concocted.
The scheme ended up being that the younger of the two girls, Olivia, the one whose
mother her sisters and brothers called “Grandma,” would become a cousin, orphaned by the tragic death of both of her parents in, not quite a croquet accident, but by an incident that indeed had a story, the telling of which some 75 years later would become considerably more ridiculous and unbelievable: the sinking of the Titanic.
What made this fabrication stranger yet was the simple fact that the ocean liner in question had gone down some 11 years prior, and since my father’s sister was only eight years old (and small even for that) at the time of this great migration, she would, in addition to pretending she was really only a peripheral character in the family order, have to assume the posture and disposition of a child with a terrible, genetic, (i.e. non-contagious), disease that caused her to not mature properly.
So, now this poor girl, who only days before the trip had been a healthy, happy eight-year old, living like royalty just down the street from one of Europe’s most powerful monarchs, would have to quickly and convincingly transform into a deformed, parentless, disheveled rag of a thing, just waiting to die on the shores of a new land, with hope in her heart, invisible water on her brain, and blind faith in her insane family.
Maybe it was because each of them occupied such a particularly odd station in an already particularly odd family that Pud and Olivia had a bond. They enjoyed a relationship that the rest of the family was simply, not altogether unintentionally, excluded from.
Both were essentially novelties to the family; Pud as sideshow stud, Olivia as a sort of faux Tiny Tim, though since her maladies were fictitious, she received none of the sympathy afforded the Dickens character.
My father’s family perceived reality as something that needed to be nourished and cultivated, like a soup that - left to its own devices - would remain little more than a pot of water with some meat and vegetables floating in it, were it not for the steady hand of a devoted chef guiding it towards perfection.
They held no illusion that the story of life might cease to unfold were they not there to put their collective or individual touches to it, rather that it would be about as exciting as a bullfight with no matador if someone, someone from the Navas family specifically, was not present to ritualistically slay the mighty beast, draping it in fine silks that dangled and flowed from long, bouncing, bloody darts and swords.
That’s how my father’s father was, that’s how my father’s mother was, and that’s how everyone except Olivia and Pud were.
Everyone but Olivia and Pud had come into this world with a sense of privilege, entitlement and destiny. Each of them possessed a stare that could freeze the sun and make the ocean run for cover. Each of them chose his or her words, cutting words, very carefully, yet spoke them with such quick, lucid ease that the venom the seemingly harmless utterances contained had already silently slipped into the target’s heart long after there was any chance at an antidote being prescribed, much less effectively administered.
Olivia, on the other hand, was prone to often telling her siblings (all five of them) and parents (all three of them) that she loved them. This was unsettling, especially to my grandfather.
“Love,” my father’s father would say, was a word whose sound “I would hope only to hear in the presence of a priest giving last rites, preferably to me.”
The word gave him a queasy feeling, and if asked why, he would likely have said something to the effect that its use offended his sense of integrity. He would say that he felt it had lost any real value, having been thrown about by so many hackneyed pretenders just looking for a good time; by so many clods on the clumsy prowl for easy action; by so many lotharios to so many Arabic, Egyptian, Italian, Moroccan, Dutch, Finnish, English, Danish, German, Greek, Russian, Indian, Japanese, Chinese and Swedish women who had been too weak and so desperately in need of the emotional sustenance that the word represented that they left their brains in the bedroom hallway as they, time and time again, failed to reject the clumsy advances of such tired, clichéd, amateurs.
“I love you, Papa,” Olivia would say, and Papa would wrinkle his nose and cross his legs. He was brought up in a strict Roman Catholic tradition, and he had felt guilt in every
part of his body, but never quite so strong as he did in a particularly delicate area every time Olivia said those words, which she said nearly every day, if not to him, to another member of her consistently unnerved family
Many people, she would learn the hard way as life went on, say the words simply because they hope to hear them immediately repeated in their direction. “They may as well be saying it to a mirror,” Olivia would say to herself when she was 23 years old, her soon-to-be-revealed-as-gay boyfriend having the evening before said the phrase to her some twenty-one times, she estimated, during his bombardment of repeated drunken, requests for her to permit him to bring a man to bed with them. His begging had been fruitless, his persistent declarations of affection gone unreturned.
“I love you,” she told her mother. She always smiled while saying this, because the whole reason for saying it could be broken down into three simple parts: 1) It made Olivia smile, 2) It made other people smile, eventually, she hoped, and 3) She meant it.
“I love you,” she would say to Pud, and Pud would wag his tail so violently that, given his lack of proper ballast, he would invariably fall over in a matter of seconds. Pud liked being loved, and Olivia liked that she was getting the desired response. Happiness.
Pud had a lot of love to give; even after leaving so much of it all over the neighborhood, and each day he found new ways to distribute the love, albeit by more figurative, less paternity-concerned methods.
Pud often began his mornings with a quick jog out to the nearby golf course. The course was owned by a prestigious, private club, and the Navas house bordered the 16th fairway, protected, barely, by a sparse collection of dogwoods and young spruce trees.
The house had become a favorite target of duffers with terrible slices, and once the word had gotten out that the people in the house were immigrants, the scenes of projectile-driven carnage that regularly took place there could almost be perceived as some strange preview of Pearl Harbor. Nonetheless, each morning, Pud would trot out confidently amid the hail of missiles and make his rounds.
What Pud could not have known was that his appearance as a three-legged dog, how ever much a source of strength it had become to the struggling, demented family, was startling to the town’s residents, especially those who happened to playing golf at 7 a.m., and especially those 7 a.m. golfers who were still drunk from the night before, which were nearly all of them, as golf, rich society folk and heavy, heavy drinking went together like, well, like it always will. The golfers, having commenced play around sunrise, would usually be on the 16th fairway, or the front porch, by 7 or so.
As Pud was the pet of a linguist, it would not be far-fetched to surmise that he might actually be able to understand a variety of English slang terms. This theory would be supported by his jumping high in the air and doing a full somersault each time a startled, pickled, golfer would yell something like, “Jesus Christ! What in the hell is that?!” at the sight of him. Such proof was offered often.
“Holy shit, Phil! Did you just see what I saw?!”
- somersault; lots of wagging -
“Godammed thing looks like it should be dead!”
- another somersault; more wagging -
“Christ on a crucifix, Reggie! That’s the ugliest looking dog I have ever in my life
seen!”
- somersault -.
“Hey Reg, that thing looks kind of like the puppies your Wolfhound just had...”
- a contented, satisfied look and just one, quick wag of the tail -
“…shut the hell up, Phil.”
Pud’s days weren’t always this enjoyable, but more often than not, his morning stroll was generously peppered with the sweet sounds of the fully weirded-out.
Following his initial parade, he would stroll over to the pond between the 4th and 5th hole, where, after a few slurps of water that could cause birth defects in children and a couple of choice bites of goose droppings, he would flop down for a nice long nap.
He was seldom disturbed, either because of the hour, or the particular spot, or because of his being potentially mistaken for a dead - possibly as the result of voodoo - dog.
However there were a couple of instances where his rest was interrupted.
He had been poked with a stick on one occasion.
A group of young boys had happened upon the resting, flaccid Pud and were daring each other to “touch the dead dog.” Of course, it wasn’t long before one of them was dared to the limit. And of course, it was only a matter of seconds after this that Pud revealed that he was indeed still quite of this earth by moving his remaining front leg in a quick, jerky fashion, a reaction that could very well have come as much from the stick as from a dream Pud may have been having (perhaps one in which he had four legs and there were miles of golf courses populated by nothing but incontinent geese.)
Regardless, the children fled, shrieking like monkeys on fire as they ran fast across the manicured landscape.
Another time he found himself waking up in a trashcan, bumping along in the back of a slow-moving old truck driven by the assistant groundskeeper. Again his powers as a terrifying force came to the fore as he jumped out of the barrel and ran ahead of the unsuspecting driver. The driver, so startled by the sight of what he deduced must be the ghost of the ugliest dog he’d ever seen, turned the wheel so abruptly and violently that the meandering truck did a gentle turn and roll onto its side, its occupant actually sort of walking off the tipping machine as it went. Shaken, the assistant groundskeeper rubbed his eyes and took another hard look at the animal-spirit now trotting across the 7th green. “Sweet mother of Moses” he whispered, loud enough for only a dog to hear.
- somersault - .
-end-
“I see dead people.” I don’t know about you, but I’m fairly afraid of dead people when they’re walking around. Call me a wuss, but they give me the heebie jeebies. “I see cops.” This one scares me more, and I’ve been sober and law-abiding for years now. No, it’s not because I was once a criminal or on the lam, it’s because dead people seem to be less threatening and less ever-present. 
