The Black Deer

       That dog died when the boys were four, and they were young enough when she went, thankfully, that memories of her went clean out of their heads after it happened.

The dog was never theirs. She preferred, almost exclusively, to be their father’s animal. In the expression of that preference, she was prone, once they were born and became conscious of her, to growl and nip at them. 

Once, when one of the little boys crawled on her back and applied his full twenty-five-pound mass to her small, skeletal body, Dolores actually did bite. In return, she got a couple of harsh pokes with the index finger about the snout, for the first and last time ever, and Frank confined her to her den for the evening, which had never happened before. But the truth was that her aggression was warranted, and Frank regretted his harshness in the morning.

Dolores was a strangely dignified name for a dog, but Frank had thought it fit the black chihuahua when he’d adopted her at the start of the pandemic. She had a beauty about her, an elegance, and she deserved a woman’s name. She had been born in a hoarder’s house in Bakersfield, one of a litter of half a dozen, all of whom had very beautiful little faces and the same severe liver disease. But it was only a year into owning her that Frank became aware of that, and aware as well that it meant that she would not survive to see ten, despite the fact that many chihuahuas happily live to sixteen or seventeen or even older.

They suspected that she had some miniature pinscher in her, given how lovely and long her legs were, and how compact and muscular her frame. In appearance, “Bambi” is how an elderly Mexican lady who also frequented the Hermon Dog Park used to refer to her. 

“I never seen a black deer before,” said a kid at the park to him when she was just a puppy. And the kid came toward her like an assertive lover and she snapped at him, because, even then, Dolores was Frank Ramos’ dog. 

He was a big man, Frank. He was six foot two, and two hundred twenty pounds, and there was power in him, even if he was an actor. He could actually do things with that heft. He grew up in Mono County, and he knew how to hunt and what killing looked like. 

But that. 

Coming down to that in the morning. ‘Kinetic,’ for some reason, was the word that occurred to him. He wasn’t in the military or anything, but he spent a lot of time with those types. The kinetic nature of how the two of them had done it. The sort of spray of pink and brown that erupted from the dog bed. There, a fragment of her paw. There, her pink eyeball, smeared into the tile by a very small tennis shoe.

“Oh, my God,” he blubbered. “Oh, my holy fucking God.” 

And those big legs folded and his knees went crack on the tile and he was looking at the two separate, jagged sections of her skull and belching and gagging for God knows how long until the only question “Where are my boys?” instantly sobered him and he arose and found them in the other room, serene and soaked in blood. 

It became very important to him, after that, to totally erase all traces of her, the dog, Dolores, from the house and from their memories. He buried her himself in the backyard, quadruple bagging the pieces and assembling them all in a Honeywell Fire and Waterproof Safe Chest he bought off Amazon. And he deposited this box underneath one of the larger cacti, and then ringed the grave with a new, thorny Japanese barberry bush. He deleted and ripped up all her photos, threw out her toys, scrupulously vacuumed the house twice and three times, until the last of her long black hairs was gone and there was no more evidence that she’d ever lain on the carpet or the couch or in Frank’s bed, her head against his chest like they were on the front cover of a Rite-Aid romance novel.

“Papa, I miss Dolores,” they would say, often. 

“No,” he would reply, firmly but calmly, in that steady, dispassionate voice that therapists advise is best. “We never had a dog in this house. That dog was just pretend.” 

At four, the boys were not inclined to accept this argument that contradicted the evidence of their eyes and ears and hearts. They were insistent that Dolores did exist and that they missed her. Even so, “That dog was just pretend” was the line with which he sent them to bed. On occasion, in those early days, he would back it up by denying them dessert after their dinner, and they would go up resentful and sniffly, all the parts of their soft little faces pointing downward. 

With time, though, of course, they all came to accept Dolores’ absolute non-existence. “What a fun game it was,” Frank would say. “What a fun game to pretend to play with Dolores and imagine that we had a little dog panting and rolling over. But there was nothing there. Nothing, in reality, my loves. That’s when we used our imaginations to play with our imaginary friend, Dolores.”     

Frank sent the boys to St. Benedict’s for kindergarten at the end of that summer, as he and Martin had planned. They were in Ms. Perez’ Petite Petunias class that fall, which was what she called it. She was a very small Filipina woman who put flowers on everything in her classroom, and his boys adored her. They skipped up the path from pick-up every morning. 

“I will tell you that all my students are equally intelligent and equally precocious,” Ms. Perez wrote in the comments section of their first report card. “But these boys are E-xtraordinarily intelligent and E-xtremely precocious.” And the ‘E’s were bolded and circled with little red hearts because she was grading them across-the-board ‘E’ for ‘Excellent.”

Ms. Perez’s son, surprisingly, did not have a ‘P’ first name. He was called Nathan. He was a smart, very cute, very small little boy with huge brown eyes and a sweet demeanor who went to school every day in a pair of blue and white striped overalls and a matching cap. 

The Perez family lived just down the way from them, no more than three or four blocks. And Nathan struck it up with Thomas and Timothy Ramos. They were all into trains. They were all real devotees and connoisseurs of the original BBC stop-motion “Thomas the Tank Engine” and they had big chests full of the tracks and the engines and the station parts. And Ms. Perez, whose name was Nancy, and her husband, Gustavo, were encouraging the boy’s savant qualities in it such that the boy was a real kind of expert on steam trains and had a great library of books and tapes and DVDs and such on various topics ranging from the Orient Express to the tour the corpse of Abraham Lincoln took, by rail of course, from Washington to Springfield in the aftermath of his assassination, to the book Civil Engineering for Outdoor Railroads, which Nathan claimed to have read, in full, and understood.

It became habitual for them to spend Saturdays together, then, at one of Griffith Parks’ three model railroads or at Nathan’s house up the street, where the boys were overjoyed to go. They had never had such a friend, Thomas and Timothy. Always, always, it had been just them. 

Frank was very happy for it. He was more than that, actually. He had never thought them capable of forming such a friendship. And it was wonderful to go over there and chat with Nathan’s parents and watch the boys play together or, after a while, when they were extremely comfortable together, to go off and leave the boys at their friend’s house and go be an individual. Go to a movie. Go the gym. Have sex. 

And then they all turned six, within the same few months.

Gustavo, Nathan’s father, was one of those fathers who made it his business to learn how to do everything, and to teach his son to do everything in turn. And he was giving his son the unbelievable gift of building a little cabin together on a piece of land he owned out near Big Bear Lake. He’d bought them all the supplies and the concrete and the lumber and even actual tools that were appropriate for their age and they were going to go out there for four days with a couple of his buddies and their sons and camp and sing and eat all-American food and look through telescopes at the panoply of stars in the night sky and build the little boy the cabin of his dreams. 

“How on earth could I possibly say no to something like that?” Frank told Gustavo. 

Things had gone so well and gotten so unbelievably loose and he had become so contented with himself and truly forgetful of what had occurred that he made the decision to let them go on their own with Nathan and Gustavo and three other guys and their similarly aged sons.

And instead of joining them, Frank went on a trip to Puerto Vallarta with a man for the first time since Martin died.

It was May in Mexico and very beautiful and Frank was with the man, whom he’d quietly dated for the previous year and never introduced to the boys. They spent three nights there in a beautiful Airbnb near the water, Frank slowly realizing that the only things he liked about the man were those qualities that reminded him of Martin. 

All three nights, Frank was on the phone with his sons from the rooftop for almost an hour and telling them he was missing them and that he would see them real soon. And then he would go down and see this man and kiss this man and fuck this man and go to dinner with this man and walk on the beach with this man and listen, cringing, to this man say he couldn’t wait to meet the boys.  And this continued for three days until he decided to go home. 

“They’ll be so glad to see you, honey,” Nancy Perez told him on the phone just before he boarded the flight to LAX. She was very fond of Frank. She thought he was handsome and sad and that he was a good father. She called him “honey” and “sweetie” in a way that he found slightly annoying but excused because it was well-intentioned. 

“But, honey,” she continued, “You’ve got to understand that the boys picked up a dog in the woods.” 

“A dog in the woods?” Frank repeated.  

“Yeah, a little black chihuahua,” she said, a sort of sing-song smile playing in her voice. “Like a little midnight deer.” 

A dog in the woods, that far in the woods. Gustavo Perez’s land wasn’t on any of the main streets. The neighbors were separated from them by acres and acres of forest. It was May, but, still, in the evenings, in the low thirties. 

“She was just out there, papa,” is how Thomas told the story when Frank was landed and seated on the Perez’s excessively soft, velvet couch. “We were out there in the morning yesterday having breakfast and I turned and she was just prancing over the ground toward us.”

Nancy was holding the dog as they sat there together, the two families and the little black dog. 

“She was quite clear who she wanted to go home with,” she smiled. “Made a beeline for Tommy and Timmy, even if she does still growl a bit when they try to pet her. Even so, absolutely refused attention from anyone else.”

Frank stood and looked at the dog for a time, feeling, suddenly, a sort of iron taste on his tongue, like his gums were bleeding. 

Her eyes were down and looking up. “The Princess Diana face,” is how Martin put it. 

And, though he felt as though his knees should be at imminent risk of buckling beneath him, he instead patted the little dog on her nose. And it was clear, in the way that the dog then essentially threw herself into Frank’s arms, where her affections would lie and whose dog she would be.