Toby Part 13: Healing of a Heart

“Why you obnoxious, pig-breathed, dirty-minded…!”

A yellow-tan husky shrank back across the porch under an ongoing string of furious adjectives.  “Hey wait a minute, Trix…” he pleaded, but he was cut off by a snarl.

Trixie, a purebred girl husky with just a hint of blue in her fur, continued her berserk tirade.  “Why don’t you just call me ‘Ditzie’ now, since you seem to think that’s all I am!  Pete, you’re nothing but a stuck-up jerk.”

“Aw, c’mon,” Pete pleaded.  “All I meant was…”

“I know what you were driving at!” she snapped.  “And here’s what I’m driving at: GOODBYE!”  And she stepped through the pet flap, going into her house.

‘Girls,’ thought Pete.  He stuck his nose in, hoping to make one last appeal, but the flap suddenly slammed down with the force of a small sledgehammer.

“I said, get lost!” she yelled.

Defeated, Pete withdrew his muzzle and walked away. In the few seconds it took to reach the steps, a small stream of blood began to flow from his left nostril.  “Girls,” he grumbled bitterly.  “You say one little thing and they blow up.”

It was the end of another relationship for Pete, which was nothing unusual.  He had been dating Trixie for two days – which was actually rather exceptional for him, having never in the past managed to break the one-day line.  “Ah, who cares?” he spat.  “There are loads of other girls.  All I gotta do is find someone else.”

As he walked away, he ran through all the girl dogs he knew of in Nome.  ‘Daisy?  Not a purebred.  Oak?  Ditched me when she found out I was dating another chick.’  On and on he went, trying to think of one girl he knew who wasn’t a mutt and who hadn’t chased him off a long time ago.  But nothing.  All of them fell into two categories: girls he wanted nothing to do with, and girls who wanted nothing to do with him.  “What the heck does it take to get a- ouch!”  He’d been so lost in thought (or some might say what passed for thought in his head) that he walked straight into the side of a house.

“Are you alright?” asked a voice.

Pete lifted his head to see a very attractive husky coming in his direction.  She was slender and shapely, with soft brown fur covering most of her body while white came up from her belly to cover her face.  A pair of brown patches around her eyes gave a mysterious, daring appearance.  “Oh dear, you’re bleeding!” she exclaimed, seeing the blood coming out of his nose.

Pete shook his head and cleared his throat.  “Ah, I’m OK,” he replied, wiping a paw across his nose.  “I got hit in the face earlier.  No big deal.”

She still looked concerned.  “Are you sure you’re alright?”

Pete nodded.  “Yeah, I’m fine.”

“Well, good.”

“I’m Pete,” he introduced himself, flashing a second-rate charming smile.

“Delilah,” she replied.

Pete tried to connect the name.  Nobody he knew, which was hopeful.  It did ring a bell from somewhere though.  A promising bell.  “Hey, Delilah, you wouldn’t happen to…” he began, but was stopped by a bark from around the corner.

“Oh, excuse me,” Delilah apologized.  Turning her head, she called over her shoulder, “I’m over here, hon.”

A large gray Malamute trotted around the corner.  “What’s going on?” he asked.

“Oh, he just bumped his head, honey,” Delilah explained.  “Pete, this is my mate, Matt.  Matt, this is Pete.”

“Nice to meet you, Pete,” Matt nodded.  Apparently he noticed the blood as well, for he asked, “Are you OK?”

Pete scowled.  “Yeah, I’m fine,” he repeated tersely as he walked away.

Matt and Delilah stared at each other.  “What’s his problem?” wondered Matt.

Delilah shrugged.  “Beats me.  He wasn’t like that a second ago.”

‘Figures,’ Pete thought.  ‘Meet an attractive dame and she’s already taken.’

As he wandered the streets of Nome, Pete never stopped dwelling on his lot in life.  ‘It’s all because of Dad,’ he thought to himself.  It was irrational, but that was nothing new for Pete either.  He’d scarcely had a reasonable thought in years.  ‘Him dying, and then Mom going with that mutt.  They’re the reason I can’t get a girl.’ 

 As if bidden by his very thoughts, Pete spotted something out of the corner of his eye.  He stopped and took a step back, angling his head for a peek into the back yard.  Yes, there it was at the corner of a fence.  A crude wooden cross about three feet high, undecayed despite the harsh weather it had endured in the outdoors for… the husky sighed.  For a long time.

Something inside told him to go over to it, but he held back.  The yard seemed deserted, but he had come to regard it much as a French soldier might regard the battlefield of Waterloo.  It was as if ghosts haunted the place, ready to drive him away if he set paw in their cursed domain.

‘Ah, what’ve I got to be scared of?’ he asked himself, his haughty attitude suppressed but still very much alive.  ‘I’ve got as much right to go in as… as she does.  Heck, I’ve got more.’

Looking back and forth and into every shadow as if expecting an ambush, he walked up to the marker.  “Hi Dad,” he half-whispered.  “Long time no see, huh?”

He knew this was crazy.  Only crazy dogs talked to graves.  But who else could he talk to?  Who else would listen?  It never even crossed his mind that he had not five minutes ago been holding his father as one of those accused for his present misery.  Of all the creatures in the world there were only two whom he honored: his master, and his father, and both of them only intermittently.

“I met a nice girl a couple days ago,” he went on.  “We went on a date, and…” he stopped.  Who was he kidding?  He’d lied to lots of dogs, but try as he might he could never lie to his father.  Not even when his father was long gone.  “Ah, who am I kidding?” he asked.  “She dumped me, just like they always do.  Every time I try to get a girl, they’re not interested.”

His mind flashed at random to all the times he had seen Toby and Luna out on walks, exchanging smiles, nuzzles, and so forth.  His eyes darkened.  “Why is it that the mutts get it easy?” he asked the ground.  “We purebreds have to work for what we get, but the mixed-breeds have everything go their way.”

As he spoke, his consciousness seemed to drift back to a time years ago, when he looked up instead of down to talk to his father.  He was a puppy, and he had tripped and hurt his paw while trying to imitate his father’s run.

“I don’t get it Dad,” he sobbed, partly from pain but mostly from frustration and embarrassment.  “I did just what you did, I…”

 His father gently laid a paw on his head.  “Son, I’ve told you before, you need to grow more before you can do the things I do.”

 “But I’m a husky,” he whined.  “I know about dog breeds and all, and I’m a purebred just like you.  So why can’t I run like you can?”

 Yukon shook his head forlornly.  “It’s not breed that matters.  Being a well-bred pedigree doesn’t mean half as much as having your heart in your work.  A good sled dog focuses on his mission, and on those he’s running for – thinking of others instead of himself.  Remember that.”

Pete’s eyes, which had been bordering on misty, turned to an evil storm-cloud countenance.  “You wouldn’t understand,” he grumbled at the ground.  “You had Mom handed to you without even asking.”  His scowl deepened.  “And then she went and played around with that southern mutt.”

“You’re wrong, Pete,” came a voice behind him, “On both counts.”

Pete’s head whipped around in surprise to find Terry standing there behind him.  Her slightly dropped eyebrows and barely ticked-back ears spoke of sorrow, although Pete read it as a stern expression.  “Oh, hi,” he uttered, spitting it more than saying it.  “And just what are you doing here?”

She sighed.  “Well, honey, you’re not the only one who comes out here sometimes.”  She sat next to him and stared at the crude wooden cross for a long moment.  “I heard you say I was ‘handed over’ to Yukon, and I’m afraid you’ve got that wrong.”

Pete snorted.  “The lady bought both of you, locked the pet flaps so you couldn’t get out unless she took you on walks…”

She shook her head.  “All that really meant was that we were indoor dogs living in the same house.”

Pete rolled his eyes.  “But still, the lady practically gave you to him.”

Terry considered this.  “If you want to look at it that way, maybe,” she agreed, “But there was more to it than that.  Yukon and I could have been locked up for a hundred years and it wouldn’t have mattered unless we both wanted it to.  But we did, and we made a commitment to each other.  A lifetime commitment.”

Pete shook his head.  “And then you dropped Dad and went straight for the first mutt to come along once he was out of the way.”

Terry quietly sighed.  ‘Here we go again,’ she thought.  “He wasn’t ‘out of the way,’ and I didn’t ‘go straight for’ anyone,” she replied.  “I didn’t even know Rex existed until weeks after your father was gone, and even when we first met we were just friends for a long time before I considered anything past that.  When we finally did discuss the possibility of something more, I actually turned him down at first because of Yukon.  The only reason I finally said yes was because I knew there was more to it than anything outside of us.  It was…”

“Yadda, yadda,” Pete muttered.  “You’ve played this record before, Mom.  You flipped for him because you knew deep down it was love.  Now enough with the fairy tales already.”

Terry