Dog Story

My dog sometimes gets a mention in my stories but I never considered writing one about him until tonight. Even his enemies the chickens got a story the other day so tonight he gets his just deserts.

Last year my brother in law asked me to share the price of a street front block in the village. The price was better than good so I agreed and he built a karaoke restaurant on it. This was the brainchild of his new son in law, a former high school drug dealer who had seen the light for reasons that will soon become apparent.

Pen, the brother in law, had a daughter whose beauty took your breath away. At fourteen she could literally stop traffic. Every day she got on the bus and headed off to high school like a good little girl, going to one of the better schools about fifteen kilometers away on the Chiang Rai side of the village. One day the proud parents received a letter saying she had been expelled. Like parents anywhere in the world they waited anxiously for her return home and put her to the question.

The conversation went like this:

You’ve been expelled from school.
Good, I hate that school anyway, they all hate me there.
But they must have had a reason to expel you.
No, they just hate me, don’t you worry about them I’m sick of school anyway.
Hold on, we think we should go down and have a talk to the head master.
(Sweating) No No, it’s because I’ve got a boy friend, they don’t like my boy friend.
Boyfriend? What boyfriend, we don’t know anything about a boyfriend.
(Now really sweating) Just a boyfriend at school, I’m not going back there anyway.

So like parents anywhere in the world they headed for the school to be told “boyfriend? What’s that got to do with it, she’s expelled because we haven’t seen her for three months.”
More intense questioning immediately after revealed the existence of Nat, a cheerful, spindly lad of twenty who had been pushing a little Yah Bah (Thai amphetamine) over the school fence.

A vindictive Pen immediately called in his contacts with the local police force and had Nat thrown straight into the slammer. Anyone here who’s thinking that the age of consent law is not taken seriously in Thailand take note. Nat’s father appeared on the scene and had to lay out some serious baht to get him out of slam, a fact not unnoticed by Pen.

So what’s this got to do with my dog? Hang on, hang on. Nat and his Dad appeared one night and a council of war was carried out. The kid’s were in love we were told, they wanted to get married, Nat (looking at two to three years) would move in with Pen and Pen would drop the charges. I took the wedding photos.

Nat had seen the presence of two Farangs in the family and probably dreamed of an easy ride; he had barely arisen from his marriage bed before being presented with a spade and a bush knife and pointed at tracts of uncleared family land.
Son Nom Nar, Nat. (Serve you right).

I eventually came to like Nat; one of his jobs was washing my car and I would bring out a couple of bottles of Leo beer and share them with him after the job. He would attempt to talk in English, having no more qualifications than any one else in the family, but less worried about losing face when making a mistake. He loved animals and would come down and play with my wife’s rabbits before they departed the planet for various reasons.

Nat had a culinary skill that involved burning strips of buffalo hide black,
(don’t ask me about the fucking dog again, I’ll get around to him)
and hammering it flat then serving it up to unsuspecting customers; I’ve eaten most things in Asia but the taste of it took my breath away. So a restaurant was built by Pen and Nat, who by this stage had almost come to like hard work, a karaoke machine was hired and business commenced. As a half owner of the land I took a proprietary interest in the project and would walk down with my dog every night after dinner,
(there, satisfied now?)
and have a beer.

Noticing that the villages lads would congregate there I would send a bottle across to their table and soon it was agreed I was “Chai dee.” (Good heart). No worries walking home drunk in the dark you see. They sold lao khau (moonshine whiskey), some coloured an attractive pink for the more discerning drinker, and it soon became the most popular watering hole in the village.

I was down there tonight with my dog and attracted the attention of a group of Thaïs, strangers to the village, who were really drunk. A conversation commenced in which my atrocious Thai/ Lanna Thai/ Lao reduced them to hysterics and they became impressed by my dog’s one party trick which consisted of sitting when told-“Nang long!” and asking for food by raising a paw-“Koor gun!” He happily ground up all the available chicken bones, even he wasn’t keen on the crispy kwai hide, until, deciding to leave, one of the drunker Thais, and they were all legless, staggered over to shake my hand farewell. I get this occasionally, even deep in the countryside men will shake hands with me to show how westernised and sophisticated they are. The little dog let out a shriek of outrage and bit him on the thumb of his outstretched hand.

There was nothing personal in this, he had been allowing them to pat him while he wagged his stump of a tail in appreciation, it was pure and simple- keep your hands off my boss. Stunned, we all looked at him unable to believe the transformation; sure he looked like a Doberman, well about a third the size with a gentle hound face and large floppy ears but he had never bitten anyone other than in play and then accidentally. Mystified, the drunken Thais departed after a short discussion on who was the least incapable of driving their pick up.

The dog came to us as a second hand dog; another of my wife’s brothers was in the habit of bringing home pets for his six year old son. This was a guilt thing (if Thai men suffer from such a thing as guilt) as he had kidnapped his children off his estranged wife and dumped them on his seventy year old mother where he rarely saw them, having a girl friend in another village. The boy was casually cruel to animals and eventually the old girl kept it tied up under the house all day, a common practice with more excitable pups. My wife started bringing it home so she could play with it and eventually I resigned my self to the fact that we had a dog.

His name was Yoyo, (look, I told you it was a second hand dog) and this became Ee-Yo, an affectionate diminutive for names in this part of the country. I decided that if we had a dog he would conduct himself as a gentleman; regular baths and he would walk on a lead. He would avoid the company of the village dogs, at his size he wouldn’t have lasted five seconds anyway, and would be regularly checked for what my wife called “insects”.

A few years ago I had a steady girlfriend in the Philippines. The barfine system in Angeles city is different to Thailand. There a single payment, usually about 20USD, not only releases the girl from the bar but covers any sporting events that go on afterwards. A gratuity the next morning is appreciated but not compulsory. People who go there regularly often take advantage of the steady girlfriend system which involves a single payment of about of about 400USD which the girl receives half as she does with any barfine. This means that the girl can leave the bar on your arrival without further payment- to the bar anyway, the girl comes to a private arrangement with the man. A lot of people ignore this system, guys who live there full time who wish to live with a girl will just take her out of the bar and this rarely causes problems. However a girl who regularly leaves the bar, without a barfine, to stay with tourists will find it difficult to get work once the word gets around.

We were talking in bed one afternoon with the TV on, she was one of those girls who liked to watch it over your shoulder during the action, and she said, “See the dog?”
Some mutt like Lassie on a lead. When she was a little girl she told me she had seen a dog on a lead for the first time on TV. I’d been to where she grew up, some filthy squatter’s camp on the side of a mountain in a shithole called Boulacan Province outside of Manila.

Anyway one of the neighbours bought a TV; probably a lottery win as people are never too poor to gamble, and entranced she headed home and rounded up one of the family fleabags, tied a bit of rope around its neck and took it for a walk. The minute she hit the street, she said, every dog within half a mile flipped out. Taking advantage of its disadvantaged condition they rushed up the road to either fuck it or fight it. She flung the lead away and fled.
I like the good words, and I didn’t need to look very far to find poignant for that story.