The Neighbor’s Dog

    (Dewie Lovelace, my cowpoke guru and pal, told this story over the whine of immense pump motors that suck water from the Snake River at the Dead Ox pump station north of Ontario, Oregon.)
     Neighbors. Takes all kinds of folks to be neighbors, and you never really know who is living down the lane. Carolyn and I have moved around some, so we’ve had different types of neighbors. The one that lives down the road from us was about as different as they come.

     Let's call him Joe. To get to our place you drive past his place. He moved in there two years ago last April. Lived all alone. Don't know exactly where he came from, but when he showed up he was packing Pennsylvania plates on a Pinto station wagon. He seemed to spend most of the day drinking on his porch.
     Two Julys ago, I was coming home from town and spotted Joe on the porch with his little white poodle dog so I slowed down and gave him the big wave, just being friendly, never hurts. Well, I no more than got home than the phone rang and it was Joe telling me I had just run over his dog. I'm pretty sure I saw that dog up on the porch when I drove by, and didn't feel any thumps or hear any yelps, but it is difficult to be sure of anything nowadays, so I apologized for running over his dog and asked him if there was anything I could do for him.
      He said he wanted a new dog. I just happened to have a friend across the valley whose bitch had dropped a big litter of poodle-type pups and I told Joe that I'd do my best to get a white one for him. He said he didn't want another poodle, that he had his heart set on a registered German shepherd pup.
     If I had run over a dog at all, I'd run over a mongrel poodle. Substituting a pureblood police dog seemed to me to be a like he was asking me for a Cadillac after I'd dented up his Pinto, and I told him so. That didn't help a thing. Just gave him the idea to hit up my automobile insurance company for three hundred dollars for the poodle.
     It took the better part of a month for the insurance company to convince Joe that the dead dog, if there was one, had been in a public road right-of-way when hit, that I hadn't actually driven up onto Joe's porch and run over the dog, and therefore the dog was in the wrong place at the wrong time to have anything to do with liability insurance. As a matter of fact, being owner of the dog, he could be held liable for any damage to my vehicle.
     Joe phoned me one supper time to say that he had decided that a little white poodle pup wouldn't be so bad after all. By this time, my buddy had given away all the pups. I told Joe that I figured that the dog question was pretty much a done deal. I apologized once again for hitting his dog, if I had hit his dog.
     Like I said, Joe was a drinking man, the kind of feller that shifts personality gears and comes uncorked at a certain point in his boozing. Fifteen minutes after the phone call, Joe was out on our front porch yelling about what a rotten, no-account bastard I was, about how he missed his dog, and about how he was going to take two hundred dollars out of my hide.
     I don't cotton much to anybody calling me names on my own property, so I popped on the porch light to make sure Joe wasn't packing a gun then went out to meet him. Just about the time I was thinking about feeding him some front teeth, Carolyn came busting through the screen door, put both hands on Joe's chest, and rolled him off the porch, down five stairs, and into her little goldfish pond. 
     That puddle isn't but two feet deep, but Joe was too sloshed to know which direction was up and he was flailing around like he had been thrown into the Snake River. Mostly to keep him from beaching the fish, I went down off the porch, dragged him out and set him on the sidewalk.
    Maybe Joe hit his head on the stairs on the way down, or maybe he saw his maker there in the fishpond, or maybe that was the last straw of some kind. Whatever it was, it worked like shock therapy on him, because Joe quit using booze that very night and he has been the best of neighbors since. Got a job, bought a horse, went to riding the high country with the search and rescue folks, and does a good job at keeping up the fences between his place and ours. Even found himself a live-in girlfriend. I gave them a German shepherd pup last Christmas day.