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I love the little guy."
He was never really my dog. He was more like my step-dog, but together we named him Steve. We thought it was funny, giving a dog a man's name like that. But it fit, like Miss Tennessee, which I started just to tease her about being full-grown and long- legged and pretty, but in a tomboyish way that made it both absolutely ridiculous and absolutely plausible that she had ever been Miss Anything. It always made her swallow a grin. Steve's name, on the other hand, made it sound like he wasn't a dog at all, but this little man. Miss Tennessee often called him that: the little man.
Steve liked me okay but he loved Miss Tennessee. With me it was man things. After he got snipped or when he was stung by bees, down there, in grass that came up to his chin, he would come sit by me, hoping I'd understand. With her, it was everything else. When she took a bath, he stood with his paws on the side of the tub, and when she went someplace he couldn't go he stood where he last saw her and waited. If she went into a store and left us together in the car, he stood with his paws on the dashboard, waiting and crying and looking at me like maybe I was to blame.
He was tough in his own way. He growled at people passing by and people who didn't give him what he wanted. It was a deep and sincere growl, if not loud or at all intimidating, based as it was on anatomy smaller than a cat's. Like a cat, he sometimes brought home dead things. He brought Miss Tennessee chipmunks and mice and assorted birds, which I buried -- in his view and with much ceremony -- in the soft, gray dirt under the porch.
His confidence was not unshakable, however. He was aware of certain limitations. Sometimes, when furious, like at me or at Miss Tennessee's sister or Miss Tennessee's sister's dog -- an Alsatian monster who sometimes came over and hoarded all the little man's bones -- he knew better than to strike directly so he would bite something else instead. He'd bite the arm of the couch or a pillow or the l
Single: Miss Tennessee b/w The Cryerer, page 1
by Jim Hanas