Part 2: My Motorcycle Club Left a One-Year-Old Pit Bull Tied to My Front Porch Twenty-Two Days After My Wife Died. I Did Not Open the Door for Two Days. On the Third Day, I Found Out What They Had Trained the Dog to Do.
The Iron Vesper Motorcycle Club has thirty-one members in the Allentown chapter. Most of us are over sixty. Four of us are over seventy. Two of us are over eighty. The oldest, a man named Wendell “Doc” Marciano, is eighty-three and rides a 2014 Indian Chief he is too small for.
We are not a one-percenter club.
We are not even close. We are a bunch of old men with bad knees and Vietnam stories and grandchildren we ride to visit on Sundays. We run a charity ride every May for the Lehigh Valley Children’s Hospital. We have a clubhouse in a converted auto-body garage off Sumner Avenue that smells like cigarette smoke from 1986 and motor oil and the bad coffee in the percolator nobody has unplugged in fifteen years.
My wife Mary Elizabeth used to come to the clubhouse on Saturdays.
She would bring a tin of the lemon bars she made from her mother’s recipe and she would sit on the brown vinyl couch under the window and she would knit — she made hats for the children at Lehigh Valley, the same hospital we rode for in May — and she would listen to thirty old bikers tell the same stories they had been telling for forty years.
She knew all our names.
She knew the names of our dogs.
She knew the names of the dogs we had buried.
When she died, the club rode in formation behind her hearse from the funeral home on Tilghman Street to the cemetery in Cetronia. Thirty-one Harleys, two Indians, and a Honda Goldwing Padre’s wife rides because Padre will not admit she rides better than he does.
I rode behind the hearse on the Heritage Softail with the sidecar empty.
I had not put anything in the sidecar. I had thought about putting flowers in it. I had thought about putting the spoon she was holding in it. I had thought about a lot of things.
I had left it empty.
After the service, Padre came up to me. He put a hand on my shoulder. He said, “Roo. You call. Day or night. You hear me?”
I said I would.
I did not.
I rode home. I parked the Heritage in the garage. I walked into the house. I locked the front door, the back door, and the side door off the porch. I did not unlock any of them for twenty-two days.
There is one detail about the club I am going to give you now because it matters later.
In 2019, the club voted to start fostering Pit Bulls.
It was Padre’s idea. Padre’s wife volunteered at the Lehigh County Humane Society and she had told him there were too many Pit Bulls and not enough people willing to take them home, and Padre had brought it to the table at the monthly meeting, and we had voted yes.
In five years, the Iron Vesper has fostered forty-one Pit Bulls. Mary Elizabeth named eleven of them.
The forty-second one was named Junior.
He came to the club in early September, two weeks before Mary Elizabeth died.
He was one year old. He was eighty-one pounds of pure brown muscle with a white blaze down his face and ears that flopped one up, one down, and he had two speeds — full sprint and dead asleep.
I had met him twice before she died.
She had called him “the loud one.”
She had said, the last Saturday she was alive, “Roo. That dog needs a person. Look at him. He needs a person bad.”
I had not thought about Junior in three weeks.
The club had.
I am going to tell you what I know about the meeting now, even though I was not at it.
Padre told me about it three months later, on a Tuesday night in his kitchen, over a bottle of bourbon I did not drink and he did not drink enough of.
The club had met at the clubhouse on Sumner Avenue on the evening of the twenty-first day after Mary Elizabeth died. Twenty-six of the thirty-one members were there. The five who were not there were either out of state, in the hospital, or — in one case, a man named Eddie “Gimp” Karras — already dead, which I had not been told about because nobody wanted to put another death on me.
The meeting started at seven thirty.
It was not on the agenda.
Padre opened it. He said, “We need to talk about Rooster.”
The minutes for that meeting, which the secretary Howard “Spreadsheet” Pulaski keeps in a black three-ring binder on a shelf in the clubhouse, do not exist. Howard did not write them down. He told me later he had decided that night some meetings should not be written down.
What was discussed, according to Padre, was the following.
Padre had been to the house four times. I had not opened the door. The president, a sixty-eight-year-old former auto mechanic named Lyle “Wrench” Boudreau, had been to the house twice. I had not opened the door. Two of my oldest friends in the club, Doc Marciano and a man named Stitch Halloran, had each been to the house once. I had not opened the door.
The phone was unplugged. I had not checked the mail. The porch light had not been on in three weeks. The neighbor across the street, a woman named Mrs. Patti Knaack who has lived on Linden Street for forty-one years and watched me and Mary Elizabeth come and go that whole time, had told Padre on the second visit that she had seen the kitchen light go on once a day, briefly, around two in the morning, and then off again.
That was all she had seen.
Wrench, at the meeting, said: “We need to send something he can’t ignore.”
Doc said: “We’ve sent everything we’ve got.”
Stitch said: “We haven’t sent the dog.”
There was, according to Padre, a long silence.
Then Wrench said: “Mary said he needed a person.”
Then Padre said: “She wasn’t talking about Junior. She was talking about Roo.”
Then Wrench said: “I know what she was talking about.”
They worked out the plan that night. It took two hours and a pot of bad coffee. Padre’s wife — a sixty-five-year-old retired schoolteacher named Eleanor Donegan who has trained therapy dogs for the Allentown VA for eleven years — was called and brought in.
She left the clubhouse at ten forty-five with Junior in the back of her station wagon.
She had three days.
I am going to describe the third morning now.
I had heard the barking start at about six fifty on the morning of the twenty-second day. I had heard it continue for the rest of that day, on and off, in bursts, in the patient and confused rhythm of a dog who is alone on a porch and does not understand why.
I had gone to the front window in the living room exactly once.
I had looked through the curtains. I had seen a brown and white Pit Bull tied to the porch rail with a long leather lead. He had a small leather saddlebag buckled around his chest. He had a folded piece of paper tied to his collar with twine. He had food and water in two stainless steel bowls on the porch.
I had recognized him.
I had recognized him as Junior. The loud one. The one Mary Elizabeth had said needed a person.
I had pulled the curtain shut.
I had gone back to the kitchen and sat in the dark.
The barking had continued through the night. It was not constant. It was the bark of a young dog trying things — a few minutes of noise, a few minutes of silence, a long whine, a few minutes of noise again. He was trying to be useful. He did not know how.
I had not slept. I had not slept much in twenty-two days, but I had not slept at all on the night of the twenty-second.
The second day, the barking got softer. By the afternoon it was occasional. By that night it had mostly stopped, except for one long, slow howl around eleven.
I had drunk a glass of water that night, standing at the kitchen sink. It was the first thing I had put in my mouth in about forty hours.
The third morning, I woke up at five forty.
The porch was silent.
I lay in bed for a long time listening to the silence.
I had expected the barking. I had been bracing for it. The silence was not what I had been bracing for.
By seven o’clock, the silence was a thing I could not stop thinking about.
By noon, I was standing at the front door with my hand on the deadbolt.
I told myself the dog was just sleeping.
I told myself the dog had figured it out and was being quiet.
I told myself, after another hour, that the dog had probably chewed through his lead and run home to the clubhouse.
By three o’clock, I was telling myself something else.
At three nineteen on the afternoon of the twenty-fourth day after Mary Elizabeth died, I turned the deadbolt for the first time in three weeks, and I opened my front door.
Junior was lying on the porch on his right side. His eyes were closed. His mouth was open. His tongue was lolled out onto the boards of the porch.
He did not move when I opened the door.
He did not move when I said his name.
He did not move when I stepped onto the porch in my socks.
I knelt down beside him. I am seventy years old and I have not knelt down on a wooden porch in November for any reason in eight years, and my knee made a noise on the way down that I felt in my back. I put my hand on his side.
He was warm.
He was breathing.
But he did not move.
I said, out loud, in a voice I had not used in twenty-four days, “Oh, son. Oh, no. Come on. Come on, buddy.”
I picked him up. Eighty-one pounds of Pit Bull, dead weight, in my arms. I carried him into my living room. I laid him on the rug in front of the couch. I knelt down beside him.
I put my hand on his ribs.
I said, “Junior. Come on. Come on, son.”
I thought he was dying.
I thought my motorcycle club, my brothers, the people my wife had loved, had left me a dog to die on my porch.
I did not think they had done it on purpose.
I thought it was a terrible accident and I was the one who had let it happen because I had not opened the door.
Junior opened one eye.
He looked at me.
He wagged his tail, once, against the rug.
Then he stood up. All four legs, at once. Like a horse getting off the floor in a barn. He shook himself, hard, from ears to tail. He looked around my living room — at the couch, the recliner, the framed photograph of Mary Elizabeth on the mantel — and then he launched himself into my chest and licked my entire face from chin to forehead in one long sweep.
I fell backward onto the rug. He was on top of me. He was the size of a small bear and he was now, suddenly, the most awake animal I had ever seen in my life. He was wagging his entire back end. He was making a sound that I can only describe as a Pit Bull saying finally.
I sat up. I pushed him off me. I held him at arm’s length by his shoulders.
I said — and these are the first words I had spoken to another living creature in three weeks, the first words I had spoken since the night I had stood in my kitchen and told Mary Elizabeth’s body I was sorry I was late getting home from Whitehall —
I said, “You son of a bitch. You were faking.”
Junior sat down in front of me.
He wagged his tail.
He tilted his head.
I looked at him for a long time.
And then, for the first time in twenty-four days, I laughed. It came out of me wrong, like a cough, like something I had forgotten how to do. I laughed at a Pit Bull who had pretended to die on my porch for three hours to get me to open my front door.
I laughed until I had to wipe my eyes with the back of my hand.
Junior leaned forward and licked my wrist.
I sat on the rug for a long time.
Eventually I remembered the note tied to his collar. I had not taken it off. I worked the twine loose with my thumb. I unfolded the piece of paper.
The note was in Padre’s handwriting. It said:
I am Junior. I am one year old. I need a person. You need a dog. Open the door.
That was the note I had been told about, later, by Padre.
What I had not been told about was the second note.
It was in the leather saddlebag buckled around Junior’s chest. I had forgotten the saddlebag was there. I unbuckled it. I opened the flap.
Inside was a folded piece of paper, a small bag of dog treats, and a photograph.
I unfolded the second piece of paper first.
The second note was also in Padre’s handwriting. It said:
Rooster. Junior has been trained to play dead. Eleanor taught him in three days. He is fine. Sorry not sorry. Open the door. — Padre
P.S. Mary picked him. She told me at the clubhouse on the Saturday before. She said: “That one. Roo doesn’t know it yet. But that one.”
I sat on the rug of my living room with my back against the couch and a one-year-old Pit Bull pressed against my left hip and I read the postscript four times.
Mary Elizabeth had picked him.
She had picked him two days before she died.
She had not told me. She had told Padre. She had known — in the way she had known, for fifty years, every single thing about me that I had not yet figured out about myself — that I was going to need a dog.
She had not known she was going to die that Tuesday.
But she had known I was going to need a dog.
So she had picked one.
I picked up the photograph from the saddlebag.
It was a Polaroid. Eleanor Donegan took Polaroids of every foster dog who came through the club. The Polaroid was of Junior, eight weeks earlier, sitting on the couch at the clubhouse on Sumner Avenue. The brown vinyl couch under the window. The couch where Mary Elizabeth used to sit on Saturdays with her knitting and her lemon bars.
Mary Elizabeth was sitting next to him.
She had one arm around his shoulders.
She was looking at him. He was looking at the camera.
On the back of the Polaroid, in her handwriting, in the pencil she always used because she said pen smudged, my wife had written one line:
For Roo. After.
The Tuesday after I opened the door, I rode the Heritage to the clubhouse on Sumner Avenue.
I put Junior in the sidecar. He sat upright the whole way, with the wind blowing his ears back, and he leaned into the turns like he had been doing it his entire life. He had not. He had been in a sidecar exactly zero times before that morning, and Eleanor told me later she had been worried he would jump out, and I told her later he had not.
I pulled into the lot at four oh-seven in the afternoon. Wrench was outside, standing by the open bay door of the converted garage, drinking coffee out of a styrofoam cup.
He looked up.
He saw me on the Heritage.
He saw Junior in the sidecar.
He did not smile. He did not wave. He did not make a thing of it.
He said: “Welcome back.”
I did not say anything.
I nodded.
I parked the bike. Junior jumped out of the sidecar without being told. He walked into the clubhouse beside me like he had been doing it his entire life. The other guys looked up from the card table in the back, one by one, and one by one they did not say anything either. Doc Marciano lifted his coffee mug an inch off the table. Stitch Halloran put down the wrench he was holding. Padre, who was at the back of the room, set down a manila envelope on the workbench and looked at me for a long time.
He did not say anything either.
Junior walked over to the brown vinyl couch under the window.
He jumped up on it.
He turned around three times.
He lay down on the cushion where Mary Elizabeth used to sit.
He put his chin on his paws.
He closed his eyes.
The whole clubhouse was quiet for a minute.
Then Doc Marciano said, “Well. Looks like he picked his seat.”
Padre said, “He picked it three weeks ago, Doc.”
Nobody asked what that meant.
I sat down on the couch next to Junior.
I put my hand on his back.
We have been doing it every Tuesday and every Saturday for three months now.
Junior is the best-behaved Pit Bull the Iron Vesper has ever fostered.
He sleeps on the brown vinyl couch on Saturdays. He sleeps on the foot of my bed at night. He rides in the sidecar of a 1998 Harley-Davidson Heritage Softail every time I leave the house, because he howls at the front door if I try to leave without him.
Eleanor says he is not playing dead anymore.
She says he only knew how to do it for those three days. She says she taught him in a hurry, with hot dogs, and he forgot the trick the week after.
I have asked him to do it twice, in private, just to check.
He will not do it.
I think he understands he only had to do it once.
Mary, if you can hear me — and I have decided you can — you were right about the loud one.
He needed a person.
I needed a dog.
He is on the couch.
I am writing this on the kitchen table.
The porch light is on.
Follow this page for more stories about the dogs our people picked for us before they left.
