Marley and me Part 2

"Weird how?"

"Like I have a low-level stomach flu or something. I had one sip of wine at dinner the other night, and I thought I was going to throw up."

"That's not like you."

"Just the thought of alcohol makes me nauseous."

I wasn't going to mention it, but she also had been rather cranky lately.

"Do you think-" I began to ask.

"I don't know. Do you?"

"How am I supposed to know?"

"I almost didn't say anything," Jenny said. "Just in case-you know. I don't want to jinx us."

That's when I realized just how important this was to her-and to me, too. Somehow parenthood had snuck up on us; we were ready for a baby. We lay there side by side for a long while, saying nothing, looking straight ahead.

"We're never going to fall asleep," I finally said.

"The suspense is killing me," she admitted.

"Come on, get dressed," I said. "Let's go to the drugstore and get a home test kit."

We threw on shorts and T-s.h.i.+rts and opened the front door, Marley bounding out ahead of us, overjoyed at the prospect of a late-night car ride. He pranced on his hind legs by our tiny Toyota Tercel, hopping up and down, shaking, flinging saliva off his jowls, panting, absolutely beside himself with antic.i.p.ation of the big moment when I would open the back door. "Geez, you'd think he was the father," I said. When I opened the door, he leaped into the backseat with such gusto that he sailed clear to the other side without touching down, not stopping until he cracked his head loudly, but apparently with no ill effect, against the far window.

The pharmacy was open till midnight, and I waited in the car with Marley while Jenny ran in. There are some things guys just are not meant to shop for, and home pregnancy tests come pretty close to the top of the list. The dog paced in the backseat, whining, his eyes locked on the front door of the pharmacy. As was his nature whenever he was excited, which was nearly every waking moment, he was panting, salivating heavily.

"Oh for G.o.d's sake, settle down," I told him. "What do you think she's going to do? Sneak out the back door on us?" He responded by shaking himself off in a great flurry, showering me in a spray of dog drool and loose hair. We had become used to Marley's car etiquette and always kept an emergency bath towel on the front seat, which I used to wipe down myself and the interior of the car. "Hang tight," I said. "I'm pretty sure she plans to return."

Five minutes later Jenny was back, a small bag in her hand. As we pulled out of the parking lot, Marley wedged his shoulders between the bucket seats of our tiny hatchback, balancing his front paws on the center console, his nose touching the rearview mirror. Every turn we made sent him cras.h.i.+ng down, chest first, against the emergency brake. And after each spill, unfazed and happier than ever, he would teeter back up on his perch.

A few minutes later we were back home in the bathroom with the $8.99 kit spread out on the side of the sink. I read the directions aloud. "Okay," I said. "It says it's accurate ninety-nine percent of the time. First thing you have to do is pee in this cup." The next step was to dip a skinny plastic test strip into the urine and then into a small vial of a solution that came with the kit. "Wait five minutes," I said. "Then we put it in the second solution for fifteen minutes. If it turns blue, you're officially knocked up, baby!"

We timed off the first five minutes. Then Jenny dropped the strip into the second vial and said, "I can't stand here watching it."

We went out into the living room and made small talk, pretending we were waiting for something of no more significance than the teakettle to boil. "So how about them Dolphins," I quipped. But my heart was pounding wildly, and a feeling of nervous dread was rising from my stomach. If the test came back positive, whoa, our lives were about to change forever. If it came back negative, Jenny would be crushed. It was beginning to dawn on me that I might be, too. An eternity later, the timer rang. "Here we go," I said. "Either way, you know I love you."

I went to the bathroom and fished the test strip out of the vial. No doubt about it, it was blue. As blue as the deepest ocean. A dark, rich, navy-blazer blue. A blue that could be confused with no other shade. "Congratulations, honey," I said.

"Oh my G.o.d" is all she could answer, and she threw herself into my arms.

As we stood there by the sink, arms around each other, eyes closed, I gradually became aware of a commotion at our feet. I looked down and there was Marley, wiggling, head bobbing, tail banging the linen-closet door so hard I thought he might dent it. When I reached down to pet him, he dodged away. Uh-oh. It was the Marley Mambo, and that could mean just one thing.

"What do you have this time?" I said, and began chasing him. He loped into the living room, weaving just out of my reach. When I finally cornered him and pried open his jaws, at first I saw nothing. Then far back on his tongue, on the brink of no return, ready to slip down the hatch, I spotted something. It was skinny and long and flat. And as blue as the deepest ocean. I reached in and pulled out our positive test strip. "Sorry to disappoint you, pal," I said, "but this is going in the sc.r.a.pbook."

Jenny and I started laughing and kept laughing for a long time. We had great fun speculating on what was going through that big blocky head of his. Hmmm, if I destroy the evidence, maybe they'll forget all about this unfortunate episode, and I won't have to share my castle with an interloper after all. Hmmm, if I destroy the evidence, maybe they'll forget all about this unfortunate episode, and I won't have to share my castle with an interloper after all.

Then Jenny grabbed Marley by the front paws, lifted him up on his hind legs and danced around the room with him. "You're going to be an uncle!" she sang. Marley responded in his trademark way-by lunging up and planting a big wet tongue squarely on her mouth.

The next day Jenny called me at work. Her voice was bubbling. She had just returned from the doctor, who had officially confirmed the results of our home test. "He says all systems are go," she said.

The night before, we had counted back on the calendar, trying to pinpoint the date of conception. She was worried that she had already been pregnant when we went on our hysterical flea-eradication spree a few weeks earlier. Exposing herself to all those pesticides couldn't be good, could it? She raised her concerns with the doctor, and he told her it was probably not an issue. Just don't use them anymore, he advised. He gave her a prescription for prenatal vitamins and told her he'd see her back in his office in three weeks for a sonogram, an electronic-imaging process that would give us our first glimpse of the tiny fetus growing inside Jenny's belly.

"He wants us to make sure we bring a videotape," she said, "so we can save our own copy for posterity."

On my desk calendar, I made a note of it.

CHAPTER 6.

Matters of the Heart.

The natives will tell you South Florida has four seasons. Subtle ones, they admit, but four distinct seasons nonetheless. Do not believe them. There are only two-the warm, dry season and the hot, wet one. It was about the time of this overnight return to tropical swelter when we awoke one day to realize our puppy was a puppy no more. As rapidly as winter had morphed into summer, it seemed, Marley had morphed into a gangly adolescent. At five months old, his body had filled out the baggy wrinkles in its oversized yellow fur coat. His enormous paws no longer looked so comically out of proportion. His needle-sharp baby teeth had given way to imposing fangs that could destroy a Frisbee-or a brand-new leather shoe-in a few quick chomps. The timbre of his bark had deepened to an intimidating boom. When he stood on his hind legs, which he did often, tottering around like a dancing Russian circus bear, he could rest his front paws on my shoulders and look me straight in the eye.

The first time the veterinarian saw him, he let out a soft whistle and said, "You're going to have a big boy on your hands."

And that we did. He had grown into a handsome specimen, and I felt obliged to point out to the doubting Miss Jenny that my formal name for him was not so far off the mark. Grogan's Majestic Marley of Churchill, besides residing on Churchill Road, was the very definition of majestic. When he stopped chasing his tail, anyway. Sometimes, after he ran every last ounce of nervous energy out of himself, he would lie on the Persian rug in the living room, basking in the sun slanting through the blinds. His head up, nose glistening, paws crossed before him, he reminded us of an Egyptian sphinx.

We were not the only ones to notice the transformation. We could tell from the wide berth strangers gave him and the way they recoiled when he bounded their way that they no longer viewed him as a harmless puppy. To them he had grown into something to be feared.

Our front door had a small oblong window at eye level, four inches wide by eight inches long. Marley lived for company, and whenever someone rang the bell, he would streak across the house, going into a full skid as he approached the foyer, careening across the wood floors, tossing up throw rugs as he slid and not stopping until he crashed into the door with a loud thud. He then would hop up on his hind legs, yelping wildly, his big head filling the tiny window to stare straight into the face of whoever was on the other side. For Marley, who considered himself the resident Welcome Wagon, it was a joyous overture. For door-to-door salespeople, postal carriers, and anyone else who didn't know him, though, it was as if Cujo had just jumped out of the Stephen King novel and the only thing that stood between them and a merciless mauling was our wooden door. More than one stranger, after ringing the doorbell and seeing Marley's barking face peering out at them, beat a quick retreat to the middle of the driveway, where they stood waiting for one of us to answer.

This, we found, was not necessarily a bad thing.

Ours was what urban planners call a changing neighborhood. Built in the 1940s and '50s and initially populated by s...o...b..rds and retirees, it began to take on a gritty edge as the original homeowners died off and were replaced by a motley group of renters and working-cla.s.s families. By the time we moved in, the neighborhood was again in transition, this time being gentrified by gays, artists, and young professionals drawn to its location near the water and its funky, Deco-style architecture.

Our block served as a buffer between hard-bitten South Dixie Highway and the posh estate homes along the water. Dixie Highway was the original U.S. 1 that ran along Florida's eastern coast and served as the main route to Miami before the arrival of the interstate. It was five lanes of sun-baked pavement, two in each direction with a shared left-turn lane, and it was lined with a slightly decayed and unseemly a.s.sortment of thrift stores, gas stations, fruit stands, consignment shops, diners, and mom-and-pop motels from a bygone era.

On the four corners of South Dixie Highway and Churchill Road stood a liquor store, a twenty-four-hour convenience mart, an import shop with heavy bars on the window, and an open-air coin laundry where people hung out all night, often leaving bottles in brown bags behind. Our house was in the middle of the block, eight doors down from the action.

The neighborhood seemed safe to us, but there were telltales of its rough edge. Tools left out in the yard disappeared, and during a rare cold spell, someone stole every stick of firewood I had stacked along the side of the house. One Sunday we were eating breakfast at our favorite diner, sitting at the table we always sat at, right in the front window, when Jenny pointed to a bullet hole in the plate gla.s.s just above our heads and noted dryly, "That definitely wasn't there last time we were here."

One morning as I was pulling out of our block to drive to work, I spotted a man lying in the gutter, his hands and face b.l.o.o.d.y. I parked and ran up to him, thinking he had been hit by a car. But when I squatted down beside him, a strong stench of alcohol and urine hit me, and when he began to talk, it was clear he was inebriated. I called an ambulance and waited with him, but when the crew arrived he refused treatment. As the paramedics and I stood watching, he staggered away in the direction of the liquor store.

And there was the night a man with a slightly desperate air about him came to my door and told me he was visiting a house in the next block and had run out of gas for his car. Could I lend him five dollars? He'd pay me back first thing in the morning. Sure you will, pal, Sure you will, pal, I thought. When I offered to call the police for him instead, he mumbled a lame excuse and disappeared. I thought. When I offered to call the police for him instead, he mumbled a lame excuse and disappeared.

Most unsettling of all was what we learned about the small house kitty-corner from ours. A murder had taken place there just a few months before we moved in. And not just a run-of-the-mill murder, but a horribly gruesome one involving an invalid widow and a chain saw. The case had been all over the news, and before we moved in we were well familiar with its details-everything, that is, except the location. And now here we were living across the street from the crime scene.

The victim was a retired schoolteacher named Ruth Ann Nedermier, who had lived in the house alone and was one of the original settlers of the neighborhood. After hip-replacement surgery, she had hired a day nurse to help care for her, which was a fatal decision. The nurse, police later ascertained, had been stealing checks out of Mrs. Nedermier's checkbook and forging her signature.

The old woman had been frail but mentally sharp, and she confronted the nurse about the missing checks and the unexplained charges to her bank account. The panicked nurse bludgeoned the poor woman to death, then called her boyfriend, who arrived with a chain saw and helped her dismember the body in the bathtub. Together they packed the body parts in a large trunk, rinsed the woman's blood down the drain, and drove away.

For several days, Mrs. Nedermier's disappearance remained a mystery, our neighbors later told us. The mystery was solved when a man called the police to report a horrible stench coming from his garage. Officers discovered the trunk and its ghastly contents. When they asked the homeowner how it got there, he told them the truth: his daughter had asked if she could store it there for safekeeping.

Although the grisly murder of Mrs. Nedermier was the most-talked-about event in the history of our block, no one had mentioned a word about it to us as we prepared to buy the house. Not the real estate agent, not the owners, not the inspector, not the surveyor. Our first week in the house, the neighbors came over with cookies and a ca.s.serole and broke the news to us. As we lay in our bed at night, it was hard not to think that just a hundred feet from our bedroom window a defenseless widow had been sawn into pieces. It was an inside job, we told ourselves, something that would never happen to us. Yet we couldn't walk by the place or even look out our front window without thinking about what had happened there.

Somehow, having Marley aboard with us, and seeing how strangers eyed him so warily, gave us a sense of peace we might not have had otherwise. He was a big, loving dope of a dog whose defense strategy against intruders would surely have been to lick them to death. But the prowlers and predators out there didn't need to know that. To them he was big, he was powerful, and he was unpredictably crazy. And that is how we liked it.

Pregnancy suited Jenny well. She began rising at dawn to exercise and walk Marley. She prepared wholesome, healthy meals, loaded with fresh vegetables and fruits. She swore off caffeine and diet sodas and, of course, all alcohol, not even allowing me to stir a tablespoon of cooking sherry into the pot.

We had sworn to keep the pregnancy a secret until we were confident the fetus was viable and beyond the risk of miscarriage, but on this front neither of us did well. We were so excited that we dribbled out our news to one confidant after another, swearing each to silence, until our secret was no longer a secret at all. First we told our parents, then our siblings, then our closest friends, then our office mates, then our neighbors. Jenny's stomach, at ten weeks, was just starting to round slightly. It was beginning to seem real. Why not share our joy with the world? By the time the day arrived for Jenny's examination and sonogram, we might as well have plastered it on a billboard: John and Jenny are expecting.

I took off work the morning of the doctor's appointment and, as instructed, brought a blank videotape so I could capture the first grainy images of our baby. The appointment was to be part checkup, part informational meeting. We would be a.s.signed to a nurse-midwife who could answer all our questions, measure Jenny's stomach, listen for the baby's heartbeat, and, of course, show us its tiny form inside of her.

We arrived at 9:00 A A.M., br.i.m.m.i.n.g with antic.i.p.ation. The nurse-midwife, a gentle middle-aged woman with a British accent, led us into a small exam room and immediately asked: "Would you like to hear your baby's heartbeat?" Would we ever, we told her. We listened intently as she ran a sort of microphone hooked to a speaker over Jenny's abdomen. We sat in silence, smiles frozen on our faces, straining to hear the tiny heartbeat, but only static came through the speaker.

The nurse said that was not unusual. "It depends on how the baby is lying. Sometimes you can't hear anything. It might still be a little early." She offered to go right to the sonogram. "Let's have a look at your baby," she said breezily.

"Our first glimpse of baby Grogie," Jenny said, beaming at me. The nurse-midwife led us into the sonogram room and had Jenny lie back on a table with a monitor screen beside it.

"I brought a tape," I said, waving it in front of her.

"Just hold on to it for now," the nurse said as she pulled up Jenny's s.h.i.+rt and began running an instrument the size and shape of a hockey puck over her stomach. We peered at the computer monitor at a gray ma.s.s without definition. "Hmm, this one doesn't seem to be picking anything up," she said in a completely neutral voice. "We'll try a v.a.g.i.n.al sonogram. You get much more detail that way."

She left the room and returned moments later with another nurse, a tall bleached blonde with a monogram on her fingernail. Her name was Essie, and she asked Jenny to remove her panties, then inserted a latex-covered probe into her v.a.g.i.n.a. The nurse was right: the resolution was far superior to that of the other sonogram. She zoomed in on what looked like a tiny sac in the middle of the sea of gray and, with the click of a mouse, magnified it, then magnified it again. And again. But despite the great detail, the sac just looked like an empty, shapeless sock to us. Where were the little arms and legs the pregnancy books said would be formed by ten weeks? Where was the tiny head? Where was the beating heart? Jenny, her neck craned sideways to see the screen, was still br.i.m.m.i.n.g with antic.i.p.ation and asked the nurses with a little nervous laugh, "Is there anything in there?"

I looked up to catch Essie's face, and I knew the answer was the one we did not want to hear. Suddenly I realized why she hadn't been saying anything as she kept clicking up the magnification. She answered Jenny in a controlled voice: "Not what you'd expect to see at ten weeks." I put my hand on Jenny's knee. We both continued staring at the blob on the screen, as though we could will it to life.

"Jenny, I think we have a problem here," Essie said. "Let me get Dr. Sherman."

As we waited in silence, I learned what people mean when they describe the swarm of locusts that descends just before they faint. I felt the blood rus.h.i.+ng out of my head and heard buzzing in my ears. If I don't sit down, If I don't sit down, I thought, I thought, I'm going to collapse. I'm going to collapse. How embarra.s.sing would that be? My strong wife bearing the news stoically as her husband lay unconscious on the floor, the nurses trying to revive him with smelling salts. I half sat on the edge of the examining bench, holding Jenny's hand with one of mine and stroking her neck with the other. Tears welled in her eyes, but she didn't cry. How embarra.s.sing would that be? My strong wife bearing the news stoically as her husband lay unconscious on the floor, the nurses trying to revive him with smelling salts. I half sat on the edge of the examining bench, holding Jenny's hand with one of mine and stroking her neck with the other. Tears welled in her eyes, but she didn't cry.

Dr. Sherman, a tall, distinguished-looking man with a gruff but affable demeanor, confirmed that the fetus was dead. "We'd be able to see a heartbeat, no question," he said. He gently told us what we already knew from the books we had been reading. That one in six pregnancies ends in miscarriage. That this was nature's way of sorting out the weak, the r.e.t.a.r.ded, the grossly deformed. Apparently remembering Jenny's worry about the flea sprays, he told us it was nothing we did or did not do. He placed his hand on Jenny's cheek and leaned in close as if to kiss her. "I'm sorry," he said. "You can try again in a couple of months."

We both just sat there in silence. The blank videotape sitting on the bench beside us suddenly seemed like an incredible embarra.s.sment, a sharp reminder of our blind, naive optimism. I wanted to throw it away. I wanted to hide it. I asked the doctor: "Where do we go from here?"

"We have to remove the placenta," he said. "Years ago, you wouldn't have even known you had miscarried yet, and you would have waited until you started hemorrhaging."

He gave us the option of waiting over the weekend and returning on Monday for the procedure, which was the same as an abortion, with the fetus and placenta being vacuumed from the uterus. But Jenny wanted to get it behind her, and so did I. "The sooner the better," she said.

"Okay then," Dr. Sherman said. He gave her something to force her to dilate and was gone. Down the hall we could hear him enter another exam room and boisterously greet an expectant mother with jolly banter.

Alone in the room, Jenny and I fell heavily into each other's arms and stayed that way until a light knock came at the door. It was an older woman we had never seen before. She carried a sheaf of papers. "I'm sorry, sweetie," she said to Jenny. "I'm so sorry." And then she showed her where to sign the waiver acknowledging the risks of uterine suction.

When Dr. Sherman returned he was all business. He injected Jenny first with Valium and then Demerol, and the procedure was quick if not painless. He was finished before the drugs seemed to fully kick in. When it was over, she lay nearly unconscious as the sedatives took their full effect. "Just make sure she doesn't stop breathing," the doctor said, and he walked out of the room. I couldn't believe it. Wasn't it his job to make sure she didn't stop breathing? The waiver she signed never said "Patient could stop breathing at any time due to overdose of barbiturates." I did as I was told, talking to her in a loud voice, rubbing her arm, lightly slapping her cheek, saying things like, "Hey, Jenny! What's my name?" She was dead to the world.

After several minutes Essie stuck her head in to check on us. She caught one glimpse of Jenny's gray face and wheeled out of the room and back in again a moment later with a wet washcloth and smelling salts, which she held under Jenny's nose for what seemed forever before Jenny began to stir, and then only briefly. I kept talking to her in a loud voice, telling her to breathe deeply so I could feel it on my hand. Her skin was ashen; I found her pulse: sixty beats per minute. I nervously dabbed the wet cloth across her forehead, cheeks, and neck. Eventually, she came around, though she was still extremely groggy. "You had me worried," I said. She just looked blankly at me as if trying to ascertain why I might be worried. Then she drifted off again.

A half hour later the nurse helped dress her, and I walked her out of the office with these orders: for the next two weeks, no baths, no swimming, no douches, no tampons, no s.e.x.

In the car, Jenny maintained a detached silence, pressing herself against the pa.s.senger door, gazing out the window. Her eyes were red but she would not cry. I searched for comforting words without success. Really, what could be said? We had lost our baby. Yes, I could tell her we could try again. I could tell her that many couples go through the same thing. But she didn't want to hear it, and I didn't want to say it. Someday we would be able to see it all in perspective. But not today.

I took the scenic route home, winding along Flagler Drive, which hugs West Palm Beach's waterfront from the north end of town, where the doctor's office was, to the south end, where we lived. The sun glinted off the water; the palm trees swayed gently beneath the cloudless blue sky. It was a day meant for joy, not for us. We drove home in silence.

When we arrived at the house, I helped Jenny inside and onto the couch, then went into the garage where Marley, as always, awaited our return with breathless antic.i.p.ation. As soon as he saw me, he dove for his oversized rawhide bone and proudly paraded it around the room, his body wagging, tail whacking the was.h.i.+ng machine like a mallet on a kettledrum. He begged me to try to s.n.a.t.c.h it from him.

"Not today, pal," I said, and let him out the back door into the yard. He took a long pee against the loquat tree and then came barreling back inside, took a deep drink from his bowl, water slos.h.i.+ng everywhere, and careened down the hall, searching for Jenny. It took me just a few seconds to lock the back door, mop up the water he had spilled, and follow him into the living room.

When I turned the corner, I stopped short. I would have bet a week's pay that what I was looking at couldn't possibly happen. Our rambunctious, wired dog stood with his shoulders between Jenny's knees, his big, blocky head resting quietly in her lap. His tail hung flat between his legs, the first time I could remember it not wagging whenever he was touching one of us. His eyes were turned up at her, and he whimpered softly. She stroked his head a few times and then, with no warning, buried her face in the thick fur of his neck and began sobbing. Hard, unrestrained, from-the-gut sobbing.

They stayed like that for a long time, Marley statue-still, Jenny clutching him to her like an oversized doll. I stood off to the side feeling like a voyeur intruding on this private moment, not quite knowing what to do with myself. And then, without lifting her face, she raised one arm up toward me, and I joined her on the couch and wrapped my arms around her. There the three of us stayed, locked in our embrace of shared grief.

CHAPTER 7.

Master and Beast.

The next morning, a Sat.u.r.day, I awoke at dawn to find Jenny lying on her side with her back to me, weeping softly. Marley was awake, too, his chin resting on the mattress, once again commiserating with his mistress. I got up and made coffee, squeezed fresh orange juice, brought in the newspaper, made toast. When Jenny came out in her robe several minutes later, her eyes were dry and she gave me a brave smile as if to say she was okay now.

After breakfast, we decided to get out of the house and walk Marley down to the water for a swim. A large concrete breakwater and mounds of boulders lined the sh.o.r.e in our neighborhood, making the water inaccessible. But if you walked a half dozen blocks to the south, the breakwater curved inland, exposing a small white sand beach littered with driftwood-a perfect place for a dog to frolic. When we reached the little beach, I wagged a stick in front of Marley's face and unleashed him. He stared at the stick as a starving man would stare at a loaf of bread, his eyes never leaving the prize. "Go get it!" I shouted, and hurled the stick as far out into the water as I could. He cleared the concrete wall in one spectacular leap, galloped down the beach and out into the shallow water, sending up plumes of spray around him. This is what Labrador retrievers were born to do. It was in their genes and in their job description.

No one is certain where Labrador retrievers originated, but this much is known for sure: it was not in Labrador. These muscular, short-haired water dogs first surfaced in the 1600s a few hundred miles to the south of Labrador, in Newfoundland. There, early diarists observed, the local fishermen took the dogs to sea with them in their dories, putting them to good use hauling in lines and nets and fetching fish that came off the hooks. The dogs' dense, oily coats made them impervious to the icy waters, and their swimming prowess, boundless energy, and ability to cradle fish gently in their jaws without damaging the flesh made them ideal work dogs for the tough North Atlantic conditions.

How the dogs came to be in Newfoundland is anyone's guess. They were not indigenous to the island, and there is no evidence that early Eskimos who first settled the area brought dogs with them. The best theory is that early ancestors of the retrievers were brought to Newfoundland by fishermen from Europe and Britain, many of whom jumped s.h.i.+p and settled on the coast, establis.h.i.+ng communities. From there, what is now known as the Labrador retriever may have evolved through unintentional, w.i.l.l.y-nilly cross-breeding. It likely shares common ancestry with the larger and s.h.a.ggier Newfoundland breed.

However they came to be, the amazing retrievers soon were pressed into duty by island hunters to fetch game birds and waterfowl. In 1662, a native of St. John's, Newfoundland, named W. E. Cormack journeyed on foot across the island and noted the abundance of the local water dogs, which he found to be "admirably trained as retrievers in fowling and...otherwise useful." The British gentry eventually took notice and by the early nineteenth century were importing the dogs to England for use by sportsmen in pursuit of pheasant, grouse, and partridges.

According to the Labrador Retriever Club, a national hobbyist group formed in 1931 and dedicated to preserving the integrity of the breed, the name Labrador retriever came about quite inadvertently sometime in the 1830s when the apparently geographically challenged third earl of Malmesbury wrote to the sixth duke of Buccleuch to gush about his fine line of sporting retrievers. "We always call mine Labrador dogs," he wrote. From that point forward, the name stuck. The good earl noted that he went to great lengths to keep "the breed as pure as I could from the first." But others were less religious about genetics, freely crossing Labradors with other retrievers in hopes that their excellent qualities would transfer. The Labrador genes proved indomitable, and the Labrador retriever line remained distinct, winning recognition by the Kennel Club of England as a breed all its own on July 7, 1903.

B. W. Ziessow, an enthusiast and longtime breeder, wrote for the Labrador Retriever Club: "The American sportsmen adopted the breed from England and subsequently developed and trained the dog to fulfill the hunting needs of this country. Today, as in the past, the Labrador will eagerly enter ice cold water in Minnesota to retrieve a shot bird; he'll work all day hunting doves in the heat of the Southwest-his only reward is a pat for a job well done."

This was Marley's proud heritage, and it appeared he had inherited at least half of the instinct. He was a master at pursuing his prey. It was the concept of returning it that he did not seem to quite grasp. His general att.i.tude seemed to be, If you want the stick back that bad, YOU jump in the water for it. If you want the stick back that bad, YOU jump in the water for it.

He came charging back up onto the beach with his prize in his teeth. "Bring it here!" I yelled, slapping my hands together. "C'mon, boy, give it to me!" He pranced over, his whole body wagging with excitement, and promptly shook water and sand all over me. Then to my surprise he dropped the stick at my feet. Wow, Wow, I thought. I thought. How's that for service? How's that for service? I looked back at Jenny, sitting on a bench beneath an Australian pine, and gave her a thumbs-up. But when I reached down to pick up the stick, Marley was ready. He dove in, grabbed it, and raced across the beach in crazy figure-eights. He swerved back, nearly colliding with me, taunting me to chase him. I made a few lunges at him, but it was clear he had both speed and agility on his side. "You're supposed to be a Labrador retriever!" I shouted. "Not a Labrador evader!" I looked back at Jenny, sitting on a bench beneath an Australian pine, and gave her a thumbs-up. But when I reached down to pick up the stick, Marley was ready. He dove in, grabbed it, and raced across the beach in crazy figure-eights. He swerved back, nearly colliding with me, taunting me to chase him. I made a few lunges at him, but it was clear he had both speed and agility on his side. "You're supposed to be a Labrador retriever!" I shouted. "Not a Labrador evader!"

But what I had that my dog didn't was an evolved brain that at least slightly exceeded my brawn. I grabbed a second stick and made a tremendous fuss over it. I held it over my head and tossed it from hand to hand. I swung it from side to side. I could see Marley's resolve softening. Suddenly, the stick in his mouth, just moments earlier the most prized possession he could imagine on earth, had lost its cachet. My stick drew him in like a temptress. He crept closer and closer until he was just inches in front of me. "Oh, a sucker is born every day, isn't he, Marley?" I cackled, rubbing the stick across his snout and watching as he went cross-eyed trying to keep it in his sights.

I could see the little cogs going in his head as he tried to figure out how he could grab the new stick without relinquis.h.i.+ng the old one. His upper lip quivered as he tested the concept of making a quick two-for-one grab. Soon I had my free hand firmly around the end of the stick in his mouth. I tugged and he tugged back, growling. I pressed the second stick against his nostrils. "You know you want it," I whispered. And did he ever; the temptation was too much to bear. I could feel his grip loosening. And then he made his move. He opened his jaws to try to grab the second stick without losing the first. In a heartbeat, I whipped both sticks high above my head. He leaped in the air, barking and spinning, obviously at a loss as to how such a carefully laid battle strategy could have gone so badly awry. "This is why I am the master and you are the beast," I told him. And with that he shook more water and sand in my face.