I, SPOT or The Reflections of a Rat Terrier
@SeeSpotsBook.com
INSTALLMENT VI

MY PLACE IN THE WORLD

CHAPTER 21

Conceding the Fourth of July to be a Thursday, the Object of My Devotion took his shamefully unacknowledged leave of me on Friday. The next morning began a day given over by the Begetters to rejection of the elements surrounding them. The sand and dust, the sea-damp and salt, were all to be expunged with mops and brooms and sucking air machines. I, Spot, was identified as a particular source of pollution, my hairs singled out for especial attention and elimination. Lilly’s Grandmother was insensitive enough to declare she wished to render her home spotless, and indeed she did.

Amidst the furious sweeping there was no place for me or for Baby Lilly and so we two were sent to the porch with Lilly’s Father guarding over us. To protect Lilly’s skin from the rays of the sun, a striped awning had been stretched over the porch, with netted sides pulled down from it to form a little tent. Though we could hear the bustle of the Begetters purifying away, if we sat with our backs to the door, which we did, we could imagine ourselves far removed in a home of our own. The light drifting through the canopy striped us with golden bars.

Lilly’s Father oversaw as his daughter bestowed treats from a pocket of my traveling bag. When supplies ended, Lilly tossed me a high-waisted plastic doll. I ripped the head off it, returning the torso. Lilly giggled. Seeing I grew bored rolling the head about aimlessly, she broke off a doll’s leg so I might nibble a foot.

The Begetters had given Lilly’s young Father a chore, too, to polish their trophies: gilded figurines depicting bowlers, dancers, and a plaque for “Thirty-nine Years of Distinguished Service” newly incised on a piece of marble into which a gilded model of an airplane had been screwed.

Lilly’s Mother joined us by late morning just as Lilly’s Father finished buffing up a loving cup. He presented it to his wife with a grin. She sat next to her husband on the porch glider demonstrating to their daughter that at certain angles one might see one’s own reflection in a highly polished loving cup. The family played with each other for quite a while. Not once did they look to see where I was, or what I was doing, though I lay inches away chewing on the doll’s foot. Not until Lilly’s Grandfather appeared to suggest I be taken for a walk did any of them remember I existed at all.

CHAPTER 22

Lilly’s Father begged off responsibility for my well-being. Lilly’s Grandfather himself then led me on another stern stroll. I was familiar enough now with the coastal town to observe what I labeled “shoring-up” along the path. The broad-breasted Pinscher named Sweetie, who had tried to eat me the day before, shored up the confidence of a nervous young man Sweetie dragged along behind him. The most vociferous of yesterday's yappers, a yellow little minx named Fajita, shored up the illusions of a chubby bleached blonde. Gretchen, whose hairy throat I recognized from behind a fence, was today shepherding a thirsty old lady, shoring her up to buy beer. I thought of how I, Spot, had I been with the Object of My Devotion, would have been seen to shore up his whimsy with my commonsense. Lilly’s Grandfather and I were just the same, however, and did not compliment each other at all. I could tell by the way he held the leash he was as sly and as cunning as I maintaining his position as top dog.

To avoid arguments, we walked different streets than before. A black box wheeled up beside us and at last on this insular sand bar I was recognized for what I am. Nor were these passing aficionados. These were those who cloistered in their home a Rat Terrier Princess, aged two. Wishing to introduce her to members of good families, they asked to see my feet. Lilly’s Grandfather, never dreaming my toes to be so valued, spread their length to gasps of appreciation. Thinking, I suppose, to advance in high society he invited my admirers and their Princess to a social engagement at our home the next morning. They accepted con gusto, gracias.

Noticing the roll of their R’s and suspicious of pleasure even in a foreign tongue, Lilly’s Grandfather inquired from whence this family of the Rat Terrier Princess hailed. Buenos Aires, they replied, though Princess hailed from New Jersey. The conversation now took an unexpected turn.

Big as they are, I couldn’t believe my ears. Friday the Object of My Devotion had flown to Buenos Aires from New York. After a layover in Buenos Aires while I lay unawares, he had flown to a place in Chile called Punta Arenas. After months of talking about the Pacific, mumbling about Magellan, burdening every conversation with references to the literature and history of the Pacific and its Portugee discoverer, the Object of My Devotion had gotten it into his head that to scribble yet more about the ocean he had to see it, and the passageway leading to it, with his own poor eyes. He had somehow convinced History's Mysteries Magazine to pay for the trip. While I stood dumbstruck in the street he was stuck like a tick in the tail end of South America, astride the Straits of Magellan in The Southernmost City in the World. Heads nodded to concur he was cuckoo. I kept mum considering the personal implications of the news.

CHAPTER 23

I was still brooding silently and pacing homewards when calamity fell. The canopy on the porch had been taken down. A horrid thing hung dripping there instead. Black, drying in the sun, twisting in the wind, the bottom corners still sopping fluids. My bag! My traveling bag! It had been washed! My home away from home! Cleansed!

How it had been done I cannot conceive. Boiled? Bleached? The rag that held the last scents of my mother gone, laundered odorless. The T-shirt redolent of the Object of My Devotion lay stripped of its fetid joys. My fragrance collection dispersed: the sweat of fear, the drool of happiness, the time I had an accident in the night but no one knew so I got away with it. The remembrances of biscuits past, the hair off my back woven into the nylon. The scents and sensibilities of my history gone! All gone!

Worse, when the bag had dried in the sun and been taken down for inspection, I recognized at once it had soaked in some brew that left it smelling like a Piña Colada. For many good reasons I have a dread of being near tropical produce. The sight or smell of coconuts is inseparable to me from appalling associations with a young dog’s place at a Polynesian banquet. During many an enforced hula I’ve been prodded to wiggle by terror at the thought of Terriers and Pineapples on a platter at a luau. My beloved bag, my sanctuary, my refuge, had been transformed into a fruit-scented abomination.

I choked back nausea and held my head high. Since I first overheard the unexpected news from South America, I had been scheming. By small stages I began to act. That night, to throw off suspicion, I fetched a ball a few times. When Lilly’s Mother left the house to collect the stink of death, as we listened for the smooch, I detected that the front door lock had not quite clicked close.

I waited til the pack of the Begetters seemed to be abed before I crept to the door. As I suspected, it opened with a few good shoves of the nose. I tip-toed out on to the porch. From there I meant to find and fetch back the Object of My Devotion by following the coast line south to Buenos Aires, where I would turn right on my way to Patagonia.

CHAPTER 24

On route to fetch the Object of My Devotion from Patagonia I stopped for provisions in the garbage below the porch. I found a wretched he-cat raiding a can. Unconcerned, for the moment if I headed South or not, I chased him as far as the dunes. He slipped beneath the bridge. Thinking to discover a route to Buenos Aires, I followed.

I had passed now into the river of grass I had heretofore viewed from above. A ribbon of sand stretched to the horizon, dotted with hillocks, feathered with goldenrod not yet in bloom. Here and there empty bottles and shards of glass, rubbed to beauty by the action of the wind and waves, gave ironic evidence of civilization in this, the realm of savagery.

A salty wind blew towards me from the sea. I lay crouched behind brush, suffocating in the spicy funk of cat as a price for spying on those who had spied on me. I sighted four tabby hunters, females all, occupying a sandy depression. Each in her way was disfigured, the largest blind in one eye, the smallest with a notched runny nose. Flea-ridden, their every move punctuated by odd jerks and quirks, they bit at their own flanks in unceasing efforts to be rid of those yet more miserable than themselves.

The largest, called by the others, Tssss, rubbed heads with her sisters, addressing them as Nyaaa , Krrrr, and Iyaaa. At a squeak in the grass all heralded the Mother Cat Mmmmn emerging from the thicket with an hors d'oeuvre in her teeth: a living and terrified mouseling.

Mmmmn, training her junior warriors in butchery, whet their appetites for instruction with the spice of cruelty. She knew no better than to pass on the lessons taught her by a cruel world, and reviewed the maneuvers of cornering, catching and vivisection. Never having had an Object of Devotion, these sand dune Amazons knew no better diversions. After the rodent served as lesson and appetizer, Mmmmn dug up dinner: a sea gull, dragged dead from the beach a few days ago and buried in sand to ripen.

Though I had no relish for the horrid hors d'oeuvre, I recognized the sight of game fowl perfectly tenderized, the legs stiffened, the head and body parting company. A slight bluish green tinge on the thin skin of the abdomen made my mouth water.

Mistaking my identity, the roving male I’d met by the garbage rubbed up behind me. Upon realizing his error this sentinel cried out an alarm. Mmmmn froze at the sound. Her insane almond eyes found me in an instant; Nyaaaa’s spine arched, the tail of Tsssss blazed. I instantly hurtled out of the dune towards asylum, racing into the House of the Begetters straight to the tiled chamber, slamming doors behind me, barring would-be pursuers, but also the path to Patagonia where the Object of My Devotion remained far-fetchable, but not as yet far-fetched.

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