Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
Despite his now comically flopped ear, Nero kept working. He got a second wind. He
worked with Sean for three more years on the street. And while Nero had loved work, retire-
ment at the age of nine felt fine, too.
“He adjusted too well to home life,” Sean said. “I'd come home, and he'd be on the bed.”
Grinning, titanium canines gleaming.
The lymphoma was fast and aggressive. Despite chemotherapy, it was over in a matter
of weeks. Nero was one day shy of his tenth birthday when he started gasping for air. Sean
rushed him to the vet and into an exam room.
“I was sitting on the floor, and he came over and looked at me. I knew.”
• • •
Solo and I faced man-made mountains in downtown Durham off a gravel road where the city
keeps street repair supplies. Mike turned his SUV around and put on its high beams, and I
did the same with my Camry's headlights, so they cast pale light on the hills of yellow sand,
crusher run, and rubble at the end of the road. The piles created cantilevered half-pipes of
sand and granite rather than snow. The valleys between were cratered by tire ruts filled with
muddy, alkaline water.
The limestone crusher run looked one-dimensional, like piles of gray-and-black fragmen-
ted leaves or frozen dirty ice that went straight up fifteen or twenty feet, an Escher without
open space or grace. The sand across from it was piled even higher, a huge dune stretching
out into the dark. It had been unused for so long that animals had burrowed into it, mak-
ing cave villages on the sides. Across from that lay a heap of granite curbstones; the city of
Durham had cut and pulled the stones like long narrow teeth from the mouth of downtown.
That granite had lined the streets for decades, five inches wide and three feet down, curbs that
shredded the tires of those who are bad at parallel parking, and testified to a city of an estim-
able age. Immovable. Strong. Here, piled and canted in every direction, the pinkish granite
looked unstable, with black gaps: seesaws or dominoes if Solo stepped wrong. The skunky
smell of asphalt permeated the air here, though we were surrounded by pine trees and fra-
grant wax myrtle.
Mike had planted some training material for Solo, somewhere on the mountains of crush-
er run, or down the half-pipe of sand, or in the rubble pile.
Solo barked sharply at me, impatient to be released, and then disappeared briefly into
the woods and darkness to give the trees his canine greeting. He came out of the dark, back
around the edge, running smoothly. I didn't need to tell him to start work. He motored up
the sand dune, ran across the top, disappeared along the far edge, came back into the beams
of the headlights, sampled the air before hesitating, and flipped himself around at the top,
head raised. He dropped in like a teenage skateboarder on a ramp, straight down the hill,
