Eyes of God

By Jacqlyn Cope

After my deployment, I felt like I needed something in my life to ground me and maybe I was searching for something that would love me when I couldn’t love myself. On impulse, while I was driving back home from the grocery store, I stopped by Pet’s Mart. Collapsible cages covered the black top of the parking lot, puppies and adult dogs of every breed yapping and yowling at people passing by. I stuck my hand above an open cage filled with fluffy white puppies, all of them running over each other to jump on my hands.
They were nothing like the bomb dogs used in Afghanistan. Nothing like the ones that were also airlifted and aeromedically evacuated like their soldier counterparts after taking shrapnel to the body and face. Those dogs stayed in my memory as something else, something unnaturally holy.
I wondered about the black Labrador I had seen strapped down to a litter/gurney, his hind legs casted, Iv’s running from his body for hydration, and probably pumping some type of morphine to calm his pain. I looked at the fluffy puppies and imagined tiny flack vests on them, their little bodies lined up in formation, ready to charge in battle. I didn’t want to think about them being blown apart, but I did.
Their little tongues lapped at my fingers as I reached down and patted the head of one of them, little squeaky barks coming from their throats. What caught my eye were three puppies in a corner cage, one in particular, a sand dapple color, slumped up next to his brother and sister. Both of them were white and black, amber eyes, and looked as if they were part sheep dogs. I only assumed that the big-headed brother was also part sheep dog, but he was different. He was slower and didn’t show as much interest in jumping on me as his brother and sister. He slowly clambered over and sat near my feet, looking up at me, the bluest eyes I’ve ever seen, even bluer than any person’s eyes I had come across in my short lifetime.
I had to have him.
“How much is it to adopt?” I asked one of the workers who were fixing papers under clipboards.
“Oh, it’s a total of $300.00, but that covered neutering, microchip, and all their shots. He’s good to go.”
“Oh okay. Do you know what type of dog he is?”
“He’s an Australian Shepard mix.”
“A mix? What’s he mixed with?”
“Oh Honey, I don’t know. I think the mother was an Australian Shepherd, but the people at the shelter don’t know what the father was.”
The puppy still looked up at me, his wide head reminding me of a pit bull, kind of, tendrils of long hair framing his face.
“By the way, he’s had some diarrhea since we moved him from the shelter, but that’s usually completely normal when they’re moved around too much from place to place.”
It didn’t occur to me that that was a bad sign. I ran my card, paid the adoption fee, and picked him up and placed him in a shopping cart. He seemed slower than the other two, but was pretty alert to what was going on around him. His wet tongue slobbered on my chin when I cradled him like a baby in my arms.
A neon green collar fitted around his neck, I passed by the personalized ID tag machine and thought about a good name for him. Achilles, Bruno, and Bowser, were all three in the running, but I decided upon Titus. Titus, a name I remembered from playing Final Fantasy as a teenager. It felt like the name of a God. Those games seemed like such an escape now, a child’s dream.
At the time, in between places after I got back from deployment, I still lived with my parents and when I brought him home, they objected.
“What the hell did you get a dog for?”
“I wanted to have my own dog.”
“You know that you’re not going to have the time to take care of it. We’re going to end up feeding it and raising it.”

They weren’t wrong. It was a whim purchase and I wasn’t fit to keep anything else alive, but myself, at that time. I ended up going out every weekend to mask what was going on inside me.
“Just going out this one day, can you watch Titus for me?”
I had purposefully made myself an absentee mother and had given this puppy a life where he never saw me. Sometimes, I disappeared for three or four days, stuck in a drunken stupor with friends, partying away the feelings. My mother worked eight hours a day and couldn’t keep watch of Titus in addition to her own dogs.
When I was home to take care of him, I noticed he wasn’t able to keep a solid stool. From the day that I brought him home, he continued to have diarrhea. His little body would coil upwards like an accordion when he would poop; the liquid falling wherever it would may, almost as if he couldn’t control it.
I took him to two vets, where they tested him for all of the common puppy diseases, parvo being the most common killer in puppies his age. When it came back negative, and all the other parasite tests negative too, the Vet suggested changing his diet and seeing what would happen.
I bought a $60 bag of easily digestible dog food from them and filled his silver bowl to the brim. His head would dip into it as he scarfed down the kibble, his back legs lifting into the air as he swallowed it down. His appetite was always growing and he never refused a meal, which made me believe that changing his diet would fix everything.
I made sure to stay home the week I found out about his dietary needs and fed him, cleaned up the puddles of liquefied poop around the house, and played fetch with a tennis ball that I rarely ever touched until then.
It didn’t last long. The weekend called and I needed to be away from everything again. I needed to be away from myself. As I slammed down shot after shot in San Diego, my pseudo-child was alone.
It wasn’t until one day that I came home, leash in hand, ready to take him on a walk, that I noticed something hanging out of the back of him. It looked like a rag from far away and I thought it might have been a toy or a cloth that was draped on his back end. As I got closer, little dots of brown dried blood covered the area of the dog run.
His paws up on the chain link gate he howled and wagged his tail to greet me, his insides dripping out of his backside. He was calm and happy, no sign that he was in pain. It was like a sausage, covered in red mucous and protruding almost to the ground.
I picked him up into my arms and rushed to show my parents.
My mother covered her mouth, gasping at the smell that was now present to my nose too. “Is it his insides?!”
“Oh no, what has happened to him?” my mother asked.
“I don’t...I don’t know. He was fine when I left him on the weekend.”
“Let’s take him the emergency vet, I’ll go with you.”
I loaded his portable dog crate into the back of my car and placed him in it, his blue eyes tracking me.
I tried to steady my hands on the wheel and stop them from shaking. My mother sat in the passenger seat, telling me I should have taken better care of him, while saying that I never should have adopted a dog in the first place.
Upon arrival, the receptionist at the desk asked me to sign in, but I couldn’t contain my anxiety any longer. I lifted him up to her desk level so she could take a good look at whatever had been leaking from him.
“Sit down, I’ll prepare the room for you right now.”
It took but a minute and she called us back to a room, not unlike the rooms I had seen so many times before in human hospitals, rooms where nothing but sadness lived in the curtains and on bedside tables.
“He will be right in here to look at your puppy.”
Titus was placed on the table by the vet tech and she left to get the veterinarian. He wagged his tail at me, jumping up and trying to get on my lap, where he would have rather been. I kept staring at the piece of flesh dripping on the metal of the table and I couldn’t piece together how he could be fixed.
The door opened slowly, a bald man in a white coat stepped over to Titus.
“So, I heard that this is pressing, and taking a look at this little guy, I can see why.” “What’s wrong with him?”
He turned Titus on his side, his fluffy ears resting above him, as he stared at me.
“Well, this is an advanced prolapse, which means his intestines have accordioned in on themselves, which has made them push out of his anus.”
“So that’s his intestines?”
“Yes, and it’s very dangerous, especially for puppies. How old is he?”
“Six months.”
“Okay, well, we can perform surgery on him, but it’s around 3,000 and there’s not a guarantee that this won’t happen again.” “I can’t afford that.”
My voice cracked and I felt something that had once been weighed down inside me, releasing. I knew what the other option had to be.
“Or we can put him to sleep.”
That was it, the release. I let myself cry there, in front of a stranger and my Mother as I nodded my head.
“Okay. Do it.”
He filled the syringe with the poison as I laid my hands-on Titus, rubbing his ears between my fingers.
“Don’t worry, it’s just like falling asleep he won’t feel anything,” he said.
I sniffled.
Titus’s eyes, sparkly blue, sky blue, crystal blue, God blue, looked into mine as the needle dove into a vein in his paw, his tongue licking my fingertips as his lids closed on his Iris’s, for the last time. His chest fell and his tail, that had been wagging, stilled.
I collapsed above him, hating myself for everything. Hating that I had used him to escape from something that he never agreed to be a part of. Hating that I neglected him to run even further away from myself, which I know now was my trauma. I would have traded places with him at that moment. What shame I felt for being alive.
I let it all out in that room, tears rolling out of me like bullets, onto the metal table, over the sleeves of my sweatshirt, into his dead fur. I let myself feel the death of Titus, the death of the ones I never got to know about, and the death of a past self. My mother placed her hand on my back, “There, there, now, it’s over, it’s over.”

****

Jacqlyn Cope is an 8-year Air Force veteran that worked as an aeromedical evacuation mission controller who decided to leave the military in 2016 to pursue her writing career and education. She has an MFA in creative writing from Mount Saint Mary’s University and is currently a 7th grade English teacher for LAUSD. She also recently moderated a panel at the 2020 AWP conference called, “Butch, Bitch, or Whore? American Women Veteran Writers.