Dog tales

>> The surreal stories of Arthur Bradford's Dogwalker

by JULIET WATERS

A friend of mine writes for Dogs With Jobs, that TV series about heroic, intelligent, extremely capable pups. These doggies guide their owners to avalanche victims, keep autistic children from running into traffic, chase down fugitives, or sniff out other lost dogs. One day, my friend started mulling over the idea of doing a segment on a junkyard dog. It so happened that I had a wonderful picture book called Junkyard Dogs. After 10 minutes of flipping through pictures of vicious Dobermans, motley, if cute, litters of puppies, and the occasionally noble pitbull, she put it down with a heavy heart. Mutating the quirky, inspirational tone of DWJ with the violent if picturesque reality of what are essentially the working poor of the dog nation would be a miracle.

Perhaps a job for Arthur Bradford, documentary maker and author of Dogwalker. His first feature How's Your News? is scheduled for release on HBO in 2002. In the meantime, with this first book of short stories, he's developed a reputation as a very talented teller of tall tales. A native of Austin, Texas, now transplanted in Vermont, he tells weird, violent, surreal urban fairy tales with an innocence of eye that reminds one of much older, more established Vermont refugees like Grace Paley and Howard Norman. Zadie Smith calls him "the mutt's nuts" and David Foster Wallace puts it best when he calls Dogwalker "a book that's like being able to have lunch with the part of you that dreams at night."

The dogs that populate Bradford's stories are soulful, naive companions to the freakish and the marginal. There's the three-legged dog belonging to a nameless narrator who shares his studio apartment with a variety of misfits after his disability payments are cut off. One day they meet Esmeralda, a chubby little hound who has given birth to a litter of puppy mutants. They have nubs instead of legs, several are missing limbs all together, some have no eyes and three are joined like Siamese triplets. They will be stolen by his roommate, a man named Catface, and end up finding a place in the circus.

There are the six puppies of "Six Dog Christmas," who initially belong to Troy, a 17-year-old boy who sleeps in the same bed as his single mom. After Troy leaves the corpse of the seventh pup in another nameless narrator's refrigerator for too long, the narrator decides to kidnap/rescue them.

Then there's Rodney, another three-legged dog who scampers off after an armadillo, and disappears for quite some time. His foster owner, who's taking care of Rodney for a woman he has a crush on, mistakenly believes that Rodney's been eaten by a pregnant snake. And finally, there's Ellouise, gentle bitch and secret lover to yet another nameless narrator. She gives birth to a tiny man, who impregnates another woman, who gives birth to a litter of puppies who are able to sing an a cappella version of Billy Joel favourites.

Like evolving souls, some of these dogs seem to reincarnate into other human characters in other stories. The mutant puppies seem to become the children in "The Texas School for the Blind." Two dogs that get sliced by a train foreshadow the train amputation of another character. When a narrator imagines that his three-legged dog might have lost his limb to a chainsaw, the seed of this idea seems to sprout another chainsaw accident in another story. Characters scamper desperately around this world, almost always on the verge of homelessness, and yet bizarrely resourceful.

These stories unhinge the brain, allowing all kinds of strange, hilarious and disturbing alternate realities to flow. They are full of splintered souls who need the guidance and companionship of dogs because so few humans have the love in them to walk with the walking wounded. Not exactly material for Dogs With Jobs, but inspiring nonetheless.

Dogwalker by Arthur Bradford, Knopf, hc, 147pp, $30