Sam slammed on his brakes, and the coyote paused, but did not move. Sam opened the window. “Get!” he called. When the coyote still did not move, Sam got out of the car. The coyote was not a coyote. Or, maybe it was a coyote. Sam still didn’t know what the difference was. In any case, it was young, not much older than a puppy. It had the shaggy look of a coyote, but the muscular build of a pit bull. Its back leg was bleeding, and Sam worried he might have grazed it with the car. The coyote/dog looked scared. “If I pick you up,” Sam said gently, “will you bite me?”
The coyote/dog looked at him blankly, terrified. It was shivering. Sam took off his plaid shirt, and he scooped the little dog into his arms, and he put it into the back seat of his car. They drove to an emergency veterinary clinic.
The dog had broken its leg. She needed stitches and would have to be in a cast for a couple of weeks, but she was strong, and she would recover.
When Sam asked the vet whether the dog might be a coyote, she rolled her eyes. She was just a dog, a mutt yes, but likely some combination of German shepherd, Shiba Inu, and greyhound. You could tell by the elbows, she said. Coyote elbows were higher than dog elbows. She brought up a graphic on her computer: a coyote, next to a wolf, next to a domesticated dog. See, she said, isn’t it obvious? It did not seem obvious to Sam. Nothing seemed obvious to Sam. Yes, it’s obvious, Sam said.
Sam paid the vet, and then he took the hurt little dog home with him.
He posted flyers with her photograph around the area in the eastern Hollywood hills where he had hit her, but he was glad when no one responded. He decided he liked having a dog. She distracted him from the discomfort he was in. Having never lived alone before, Sam was lonely, but contradictorily, his pain made him not want to be with people. He named the dog Ruby Tuesday, after the song that had been playing in his car when he’d hit her. He ended up calling her Tuesday.
After Tuesday had recovered from the broken leg, she could not sleep. Sam also had insomnia, so he couldn’t tell if she was just keeping him company. She paced his one-bedroom bungalow, looking haunted, occasionally baying. He took her to the vet again. The vet gave them a prescription for dog Prozac and suggested that they take even longer walks. That was what they did. They moved past the familiar landscape of their block and traveled uphill, into the winding, sidewalk-less hills of eastern Silver Lake. Sometimes, they would pass a coyote. The coyotes always seemed collegial with Tuesday, though Sam didn’t know if that was his imagination.
Tuesday was often mistaken for a coyote. When they were out on walks, people would regularly stop their cars to ask him why he was walking a coyote. He would inform them that she wasn’t a coyote, merely a dog. Sometimes, they would laugh at them; sometimes, they would argue. Sometimes, they would insist on knowing what she was, as if they might trick Sam into admitting that he had lied and Tuesday was a coyote. Sometimes, they would seem angry, as if Tuesday and Sam were deliberately trying to make fools of them. For her part, Tuesday seemed unaware that she was the cause of so much controversy. “People,” Sam would say to Tuesday, shaking his head. In her silence, Sam sensed agreement.
They walked uphill and then downhill, until they were spit out at Silver Lake Boulevard, with its small strip of upscale stores and cafés. They would then head north around the reservoir, stopping when they reached the dog park.
On one occasion, Tuesday was socializing with an Akita and a standard poodle. The three of them took turns chasing each other, an interaction both complicated and dazzling.
The Akita was sniffing Tuesday’s ass when a woman’s voice called out, “There’s a coyote attacking other dogs in the dog park! Everyone! Get your dogs! NOW!”
There were twenty-five or thirty dogs in the dog park that day. Sam didn’t immediately see the coyote, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t there. Sam called Tuesday and leashed her. It had been her turn to reciprocally sniff the Akita’s ass, so she was reluctant to come. When they reached the entrance to the dog park, the woman who had warned of the coyote incursion looked from Tuesday to Sam. She laughed loudly and self-consciously then said, “Oh my God, is that actually your dog?”
Her laughter was irritating to him, as was her use of the word “actually.” “Yes,” he said.
“I honestly thought it was a coyote.” On the woman’s leash was a small, grayish, yapping thing, possibly a bichon. “I thought it was attacking those dogs.”
Sam told her it was a she, and she had been playing.
“Well, from where I was, it looked different. It looked like a vicious attack.” She petted Tuesday on the head. “Good girl,” she said, as if she were offering Tuesday a benediction. “What even is the difference between a coyote and a dog?”
Sam stammered something about elbows.
“Well, these days, you can’t be too careful.” She said that her dog had been attacked by a coyote the week before. She described yelps, coyote saliva, a desperately hurled yoga block. Sam made noises of assent. “I need to go,” he said.
“Oh sure. Sorry about the confusion.”
It was annoying that she attributed her mistake to a collective confusion, but Sam wasn’t going to pick a fight in the dog park. The woman looked at him, waiting for Sam to say that he was sorry, too, but he couldn’t bring himself to do it. She continued, “But if you don’t know what something is, it’s better to be safe. It’s better to have information, right? She could be, like, half-coyote, right?”
His heart pounded murderously. He hadn’t slept much that week on account of Tuesday’s insomnia and the pain he was in, and he felt a disproportionate rage come over him, the facade of civilization beginning to crumble. “Maybe you should look more goddamn closely at a thing before deciding what it is and running off your mouth.”
“Hey, screw you, man! I was trying to prevent people and dogs and children from getting hurt! You shouldn’t bring a dog that looks like a coyote to the park, asshole!”
“You’re the asshole. You’re an ignorant asshole,” he said. He gave the woman the finger. Tuesday and Sam headed back home. Sam felt defeated and an inane comeback kept echoing through his head: Would you have her wear an i am not a coyote sign around her neck? Would that make things easier for you? But that would have required her to read the sign, and the woman had not seemed like a reader. Los Angeles, he decided, was a profoundly stupid city, and he felt a palpable, if irrational, longing for all things Massachusetts.
He walked back to his house, and he realized two things: Throughout the encounter, he hadn’t felt any pain. And the woman who’d yelled at him must not have noticed or known he was disabled, and that had not happened to him in years. He decided he was ready to go back to work.
When Sam told this story to Sadie, she laughed, though she barely seemed to be listening. He had framed the story in a humorous way, smoothed off some of the edges of his hostility toward the woman in the park. But as he told it, he could feel himself back in that dog park. He could feel the dry California heat and the murderous pounding of his heart. Without warning, an anecdote he had meant to be amusing did not feel amusing. Anyone who had truly looked at Tuesday could not have possibly seen a coyote. But the woman had not truly looked, and the injustice of this hit him. Why was it acceptable for apparently well-meaning people to see the world in such a general way?