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King Kong’s Ghost

David Harris

When King Kong went missing that May morning, all hell broke loose. I was replacing the toolshed roof in Liza’s backyard and didn’t hear her front screen door slam shut when he got out. She warned me this could happen, but honestly, the dog was blind in both eyes. He lost one three years ago in a fight with a Jack Russell terrier and the other a year later when it got infected from God knows what. King Kong was a small, white mutt, bathed in light brown speckles, and he had a big heart. But he was slowing down in his advancing years so the idea—I’m not trying to be funny here—that I would need to keep an eye on him, was not on my radar.

“Liza, King Kong’s gone. You need to get back here,” I told her on the phone.

“I can’t leave, Arianna’s not done.” She was helping her daughter, who was a bit of a prima donna, pick out a wedding dress. Liza said recently she wasn’t sure the fiancée was the right match. But she was keeping her mouth shut.

“Hope he hasn’t wandered far,” I said.

“Me too,” she said. “I think he still believes he knows his way around.”

I slid my phone back in my overalls and headed down toward the Esopus Creek. King Kong has always been fond of kids and maybe he could hear them playing by the water. As old as he was, his ears were still sharp. His nose too.

I was surprised Liza sounded so calm. She’d been through a lot with that dog, in terms of her personal life I mean. When her second husband Niles left her and moved back to the UK, King Kong was a companion, and then some. He took Nile’s place in her bed, and she told me the dog snored less than Niles, which overall was a net plus. And when Damian, the sixty-something fashion photographer, started to woo her the next year with promises he could reboot her modeling career, even though she was in her early fifties, he had to pass muster with King Kong. That meant all three of them would often end up sleeping on her bed. It wasn’t easy for Damian, since he wasn’t a dog lover like Niles. I know all this because I’d sometimes stop by after work for a drink when Damian was shooting in New York. It was usually her idea, by the way, to come by for a drink.

The path through the rhododendron, then in full bloom, went down a gentle slope toward a narrow floodplain created by the Esopus Creek, and followed a wide sandbar hugging the shore down to the swimming hole. The Esopus was named for a Native American tribe who lived here before they were pushed out in the 1600s by Dutch settlers from New York City, known then as New Amsterdam. Not that anyone ever thinks about this stuff, but I was an archeology major in college and like to take the long view of things.

I could hear the kids playing down there. I’d met them last summer—Aiden was ten and his sister, Alexa, was nine. Their mother, Janelle, was on the town Planning Commission (a consistent pro-development vote) and a local realtor. I’d gotten to know her when I was building a house designed by an architect friend we had in common. For a realtor, she always seemed a little standoffish. I could never put my finger on exactly why, or whether it was just me. When the kids saw me walking toward the swimming hole, they jumped out of the water and came running.

“Peter, let’s play Marco Polo!” they shouted.

The previous summer I’d come down on many Friday afternoons and frolic with them in the swimming hole for an hour or so while their nanny talked on her phone. They loved it and so did I. Childhood was the happiest time in my life. Summer afternoons by any body of water was like a timeless dream to me.

“King Kong got out and I can’t find him. Have you seen him?”

“Nope, but we’ll help you!” said Aiden. Sand clung to his scrawny body like cinnamon on soggy toast. Like most kids, he was oblivious to it.

I looked over at Janelle. She pulled out one of her earbuds to see what the commotion was about. The two kids ran over to her and pleaded with her, asking if they could help.

“We’ll give it about fifteen minutes and then I have to drop both of you off with your grandmother,” Janelle said. She didn’t make eye contact with me, which I thought was weird, like I said something wrong. She got up slowly, reluctantly, and walked toward me.

I suggested she and I each take one kid, walk in opposite directions up and down the creek, then circle back in about ten minutes. Both kids wanted to join me, but Alexa made a bigger fuss and so Aiden went with his mother.

“I grew up on a farm and we would have put that dog down once he lost that second eye,” Janelle said to me, underneath her breath and out of earshot of the kids. “Liza doesn’t know when to let go. But that’s not news.”

Alexa and I started walking upstream past a stand of white birches and found the footpath that led up toward the bridge where Hurley Mountain Road crosses the creek on the back way to Kingston. The enveloping sound of light rapids where the creek ran along a tall bank was soothing in the way a Haydn adagio can make your whole body relax. We kept calling King Kong’s name, sometimes loudly, sometimes more softly, but heard nothing. A pack of motorcyclists rode over the bridge; the din of internal combustion engines pierced the soothing sounds of the natural world. I’d owned a Kawasaki Vulcan 900 Classic more than fifteen years ago, in my late twenties, so understood the glorious satisfaction of making a lot of noise. I considered myself a mature adult but am still astounded by my ignorance back then. Now the noise just seemed dumb and intrusive. We began to circle back toward the swimming hole.

“How would King Kong know where to go?” Alexa asked. “And why would he want to go somewheres anyway?”

She was holding my hand tightly and stopped to ask the question, as if she hadn’t yet quite mastered the art of walking and talking, so I had to stop too.

“Dogs know things we won’t ever know,” I said. “They have their reasons.” Alexa, who had lovely wise eyes on an unusually narrow face, looked at me with a slight frown, as though I wasn’t being completely truthful.

“And sometimes they just make mistakes, like the rest of us. The thing about a mistake is, you don’t always know it’s a mistake until later.”

When we got back to the swimming hole, Aiden came running up the path from downstream. His eyes were intently focused on the two of us. His strides were long and purposeful, as if the child had suddenly been transformed into an adolescent.

“Mom and I found him next to a fallen tree,” he said. “She thinks he may have tried to jump over the trunk and come down on part of a branch. There’s a twig sticking out from his gut. It looks kind of gross.”

Sure enough, King Kong had gotten himself into big trouble. He actually wasn’t that far from Liza’s house. But there he lay, breathing heavily, looking like he was in pain, gently wagging his tail at the sound of our voices. Aiden and Alexa were trying to soothe him, carefully petting his back.

The twig, about a quarter inch in diameter, penetrated his skin, then followed the abdomen muscles from his mid-section up toward his neck. Perhaps he’d lucked out and there’d been no damage to his internal organs.

I asked Aiden to get the wheelbarrow behind Liza’s garage. We’d wheel him back to the house and drive him to the vet. I tried to read Janelle, who now was making marginal eye contact with me. God, she was acting weird. Was she really a friend of Liza’s, like Liza told me once? Liza said she represented the seller when Liza bought her place about eight years ago. It was a small town. Everyone knew each other and knew everyone else’s business. Maybe she just had a lot on her mind. The deep lines around her mouth looked like she spent a lot of time smiling too hard, or grimacing, or both.

“Doc Freer is the only vet open past noon on a Saturday,” she said. “I’ll call and see if he can take the dog.”

She and I picked up King Kong and carefully placed him in the wheelbarrow. He didn’t complain any. He’s not a big dog—twenty pounds tops. So it wasn’t too hard to wheel him up the path through the rhododendron and back to the car.

Liza was already at the vet’s when we arrived. I’d texted her when we were leaving and she replied that Adrianna had finally picked out a wedding dress. She ended it with a couple of emojis—two champagne glasses clinking and a slice of cake. I didn’t figure her for an emoji type. But then again, I’d received turd emojis from people I’d never heard swear. Technology and human nature—please tell me where that’s all headed.

She immediately began tearing up when she saw the stick protruding from King Kong’s stomach. Liza had strong maternal instincts and they were on full display. Her short auburn hair just grazed her shoulders, and the pain that I saw in her soft hazel eyes made me want to reach over and hold her hand. My face went all flush.

King Kong was trembling and licking his lips when I carried him inside. Doc Freer’s assistant had me set him down on the big pet scale on the floor in the waiting area.

“He’s a smart dog, but he does the stupidest things sometimes,” Liza said to the vet’s assistant. “It’s like he doesn’t understand he’s blind. He hears or smells something and just takes off.”

Liza didn’t see Janelle roll her eyes, but I did, and with the kids there, I kept a lid on my reaction. Her overall attitude through this whole thing was beginning to irritate me, and honestly, I don’t get irritated easily. Certainly not the way I used to before I had therapy and much of humanity seemed like a big pain in the ass. Janelle was acting like she had more important things to do, even though this dog might die and her kids were in love with him.

The assistant picked up King Kong in her arms and asked if we all wanted to go with her into the examining room. The kids nodded without so much as a glance at their mother. Janelle looked around the waiting room, found an empty chair, sat down and began to scroll on her phone.

The sharp, antiseptic odors of the examining room put King Kong on edge even more than he had been. Me too, actually. He was trembling harder now, and Liza tried to soothe him with her warm, soft voice.

Doc Freer came in after a couple of moments and recognized Liza and King Kong, though probably not in that order. He was an animal person, through and through. In his mid-seventies, tall with shoulders that drooped from decades of handling dogs, cats, rabbits and assorted livestock, he kept practicing veterinary medicine for the simple reason that he loved it. He slipped on some blue plastic gloves and began to feel around King Kong’s abdomen. It was hard for me to get a good read on what King Kong was feeling because, like I said, he had no eyes, just those healed over sockets. His body seemed pretty limp.

“We’ll take a couple of X-rays and see what we’ve got.” His voice was steady. I was trying to pick up on anything that sounded ominous. “Would you all mind sitting in the waiting room?”

Janelle looked up from her phone as we came back in. “Guys, we gotta go,” she said, not even asking how the dog was.

They begged their mom to stay until the X-rays came back. “Sorry, no can do. I have a house to show. Gotta drop you off at Grandma’s.”

I offered to take them and she looked down at her phone again for a moment.

“Can you have them back in an hour?”

She turned and finally looked me directly in the eye. Not like I was doing her a favor, mind you; more like I was hired help.

“Happy to do it, Janelle,” I said, trying to make clear I wasn’t.

She attempted her version of a warm smile, nodded to all of us and left.

“Sure hope the dog’s okay,” she said. I swear I’d never heard someone speak so disingenuously about an animal in distress.

Doc Freer came out ten minutes later and stood near the water cooler, arms folded. He said the stick grazed King Kong’s left lung and he could tell from his breathing that it hadn’t been punctured. But there were indications of some internal bleeding and he’d have to operate. Fortunately, his calendar for the afternoon was clear and he could do it right away.

Aiden and Alexa looked at each other anxiously, then looked at me. I looked at Liza. She gave me a smile that I supposed could pass for hopeful, and I gave one back to the kids. Sometimes we all need a smile to remind us that we need each other every day that we’re on this good Earth, because life can permanently change for better or worse right before our eyes.

“I’m going to take you guys over to your grandmother’s. Not a lot more we can do here.”

When we got in my pickup, Aiden said he had always wanted a dog, but his mother wouldn’t let them have one. He said when his parents were still married his Dad was always on the fence about it. He could see it in his father’s face. But then they got divorced and as far as Janelle was concerned, it was off the table. I know parents have their reasons, but I have yet to meet a grownup who wanted a dog as a kid and doesn’t still regret not having one.

▪

JANELLE’S MOTHER couldn’t have been more friendly when we pulled up. She lived a couple of miles out of town, up a steep driveway just off Route 209 past those two old stone houses built by the Dutch in the early 1700s. A large sycamore tree towered over the garage. The breezeway to the house was lined with geraniums, nasturtiums and marigolds that looked ready for planting.

Alexis and Aidan jumped out of my truck and ran over to where she was turning over some soil in the garden.

“Did Mom tell you about Liza’s dog, how he’s blind and jumped up in the air and landed on a stick and now he’s at Doc Freer’s and he’s going to operate on him this afternoon and take it out and he thinks King Kong’s going to be okay, but the stick may have grazed his lung?” Aiden asked his grandmother in one long breath.

“She didn’t tell me about the lung part, or how it happened,” she said, looking first at the children and then at me.

“I’m Randi, Janelle’s mom.”

I introduced myself and told her I’d been doing some carpentry work for Liza when King Kong escaped. She bore a strong resemblance to Janelle, but she looked like she’d been prettier than Janelle when she was her daughter’s age. She moved slowly, but gracefully, and had the countenance of someone who’d been through a lot in her long life.

She thanked me for bringing her grandchildren over and asked if I would like an iced tea or anything. I demurred and told her I had to get back to Liza’s to finish the job I had started that morning.

“Janelle’s pretty busy these days, and I don’t drive any longer. So you’ve done us a great favor by bringing these sweethearts over here.”

“Yeah, seems like she’s stretched kinda thin.”

“I didn’t know Mom didn’t like dogs so much, did you Grandma?” Aiden asked. Randi raised an eyebrow at him. Aiden looked at me and then at her, wondering if he’d said something wrong.

“Your Mom likes dogs plenty. She’s got a lot on her mind and she doesn’t want to be distracted by problems that aren’t hers,” Randi said. She looked over at me as if she wanted to explain her daughter’s behavior to me as well as to her grandchildren, but left it there.

▪

WHEN I GOT BACK to Liza’s, the afternoon shadows from the budding maples and oaks near the toolshed missed a sun-bathed spot in the rear right corner furthest from her house. And there in the light I saw something I hadn’t noticed before. By that one corner there was a pile of sticks, some beat up rubber toys, a dog cushion and an empty water bowl. The sticks had been well gnawed on, the dog cushion was ratty, and the toys were faded and worn.

I worked on the new roof for another forty-five minutes, then heard Liza drive up and the car door slam. I wondered what kind of news she’d have about King Kong. She walked around to the shed and stared at me as if I was supposed to interpret what her expression meant.

“Doc Freer’s not sure King Kong is going to make it,” she said. “He’s got him pumped up full of antibiotics but there’s already signs of an infection setting in. We’ll know in the next day or so. We may have to put him down.”

Her skin looked as pale and thin as a worn bedsheet and her eyes were dull and unfocused. It was like she was in a place you knew you couldn’t reach. She cast her eyes around as if she was looking for something but couldn’t remember what it was. I walked over and gave her a big hug, and she held me for longer than I expected. When we pulled back, she smiled at me through her tears. The loss of that dog was going to feel like the death of a child for her, even though her daughter was grown and about to get married.

“I’ve been through two relationships with that dog, and he had both those guys’ numbers, I could always tell,” she said.

She started walking back up to the house. “Why don’t we have a glass of wine?”

“Did you see this?” I asked. I showed her the sticks, toys, dog cushion and water bowl.

“I think these are from Aiden and Alexa’s house,” she said staring blankly at them for a moment. “I recognize that rotting doll from when I used to stop by Janelle’s after I bought this place. We used to hang out on Friday nights for a while when Niles would make his business trips back to the UK. She’s got some good stories about growing up around here.”

I’d never have guessed the two of them for friends. They mixed like oil and water in terms of their personalities. Janelle reminded me of one of those old-fashioned washbasins with two spigots—one hot, the other cold, and the latter was the only one that worked.

Liza poured us a glass of Sancerre. I’d never heard of it before she brought home a case from the city a couple of months ago and just handed me a couple of bottles one day after work. It was a little dry for my taste, but hey, I can drink almost anything if the company’s right. Liza and Damian were pretty solid as far as I could tell, but I still couldn’t help enjoying her company whenever he was away. I’d known her for years and I think she knew I’d been attracted to her for just as long. In her own way, she was flattered by it, as if she knew we could have had a fun fling when we were younger. She’d as much as said it to me once.

“I never should have introduced Janelle to that bozo,” she said abruptly after we both took a few sips.

“Which one? We got a lot around here.”

“Andy, the guy who moved up from the city and opened up the rock-climbing store about five years ago.”

“Graying man-bun and hippie vibes? Doesn’t seem like her type.”

“You wouldn’t think, would you?”

She said she and Damian were out to dinner with Janelle several years ago and Andy comes over, says hi, and they all talked for a few minutes.

“Janelle’s rarely speechless but said almost nothing. I picked up on it immediately and the next day she asked me to set them up.”

They hit it off right away, which Liza found hard to understand. Janelle comes from a long line of country club Republicans, way back to Eisenhower and the 1950s, which is saying something. This guy Andy grew up Jewish on the Upper West Side. His father had been a Manhattan borough president, and needless to say, those guys are not typically Republicans and don’t spend much time on the golf course.

I told Liza in one way I could see it though. You could tell they were both hotties in college and now, approaching their mid-forties, divorced and with kids, they were chasing earlier versions of themselves, held back only by backpain, shin splints and some pretty intense emotional scar tissue.

“They were an item for about six months,” Liza said. “That’s just about how long things last when lust is the primary driver holding it together.”

She and Damian had them over a couple of times for dinner. “They were all over each other like teenagers.”

About a month after their last get together she got a call from Janelle, who was sobbing. She’d never heard Janelle like that. Andy had been acting indifferent to her for several weeks and she decided they needed to have a serious talk. When she walked into the rock-climbing shop one afternoon, she noticed him in the back talking with one of his young female salesclerks. The way they were chatting each other up, and Andy casually putting a hand on her shoulder for a moment as he told her one of his lame jokes, she could tell what was going on. Having been abruptly dumped by Aidan and Alexa’s father a couple of years earlier, she was having none of it. She snapped a couple of pictures of them on her phone as she pretended to browse through the Patagonia and Marmot stuff. Andy never even noticed her. She stormed out of the shop, texted the images to him and told him she never wanted to see him again.

Janelle called Liza again a couple of days later to tell her she was kind of pissed off at her for introducing them. Couldn’t Liza have told her he was a fucking jerk? Given how they were acting when they were over for dinner, that made as much sense to Liza as getting angry at your mother because she baked you a birthday cake, and you got sick because you ate too much.

This was about the time King Kong lost his second eye to an infection and I remember how upset Liza was. She loved that dog and now he was going to be completely blind for the rest of his life. She was in a tailspin. Liza listened to Janelle for a few minutes, made a few half-hearted attempts to console her, but finally lost it. She told her she wasn’t in the mood to hear about Janelle’s love life, or lack of it, and hung up.

A few weeks after the call, Liza had to be in New York for the opening of Damian’s photography exhibition at a gallery in the West Village. He’d shot a series of images of local cops up and down the Hudson Valley staring at their iPhones while on duty. He ended up getting some good reviews and sold quite a few of them. Liza asked Janelle if she could do her a huge favor and take care of King Kong for a couple of days. The kids heard their mother talking on the phone to Liza and were all over it. Janelle was still so hurt by Andy and pissed off at Liza, she didn’t just say no, she said “Fuck that!” and hung up on her.

A couple of weeks later they ran into each other in front of the Starbucks and Janelle apologized. Liza said Janelle sounded more like a kid who’d been reprimanded by her mother and told to say she was sorry. Given how much poise and wisdom Janelle’s mother had shown when I dropped off the kids, I said it probably wasn’t that far off the mark.

All of this might have spelled the end of their friendship except for King Kong and the kids. Janelle would come home from work and Alexa and Aiden would be playing with him in their backyard. He was the dog their parents would never let them have. They’d walk down the road to Liza’s when they got home from school and ask if they could take him for a stroll. Liza always said yes, despite Janelle’s behavior. The minute King Kong heard their voices, he’d get all excited and start yelping. He loved those kids. When Alexis and Aiden would bring him back to Liza’s, they’d walk around to the backyard, then bring him in through the back porch. Liza adored how the kids loved King Kong.

“When do you think they put those toys, sticks and other stuff behind the toolshed?” she asked. “I haven’t been back there in months.”

“Maybe when Janelle started flipping out that she’d been dumped.”

“Kids find a way to build their own world, imaginary or not, when grownups don’t give them what their souls need,” she said.

Liza looked beautiful in that moment.

Against my better instincts, I reached over and gently squeezed her hand. She looked at me curiously, turned away toward the far end of the deck, then put her other hand on mine and lightly stroked it. We sat there in silence for several moments and she turned back toward me, as if asking what we were doing. She had given me that look several times over the years.

I couldn’t think of anything to say.

“I love kids,” I finally said, “but I’m coming to the realization that it may never happen for me. I’m envious, at least sometimes. Children teach their parents things I’ll never be able to fathom.”

“Their messages don’t always get through,” she said, still holding both of my hands. “It’s hard to hear what they’re telling you. It’s one of the messiest ways I’ve ever learned about life.

I told her that her daughter Arianna seemed to have weathered Liza’s divorce from her first husband, when she was about the same age as Alexis and Aidan were now. Liza rolled her eyes.

“I’ll never get over the guilt of that. Planning for this wedding is an attempt at redemption. It’s also giving me flashbacks for some poor decisions I made.”

A large flock of Canadian geese appeared out of nowhere and circled the house several times. They were quietly honking at each other, with another sound in the mix that reminded me of a dog’s bark. I told Liza that they probably were migrating north, perhaps figuring out if they should take a rest at the pond down by the old Van Der Zee place. They headed off in that direction and the evening returned to silence. It was comforting to sit there quietly with her.

I felt at peace.

After a few moments, I suggested she should have a welcome home party for King Kong after he fully recovered. She could invite Alexis and Aidan, bring out all those ragged toys, gnawed on sticks and the ratty dog cushion, and that would make him feel happy to be back in a familiar place. Even if it embarrassed the kids a bit to see their stash of toys for King Kong had been discovered, the party would let them know how important they were to him. And maybe remind Janelle that her the kids and the dog were more important than whatever stupid chip she was carrying on her shoulder for introducing her to Andy.

▪

KING KONG SLOWLY IMPROVED for the first couple of weeks after Liza brought him home. He spent most of his time on Liza’s bed, where she knew he would be most comfortable. She had to squirt a couple syringes worth of sedatives and antibiotics down his throat three times a day to keep him sedated and fight off the infection. I’d finished the roofing job, but stopped by several times just to see how Liza and King Kong were doing. She was pretty subdued and wouldn’t talk much, and I chalked that up to the emotional toll of trying to nurse King Kong back to his old self. Then one evening I stopped by at dusk and she and Damian were out back on the deck. Something seemed off. I sat down quietly in my usual chair. Liza finally said King Kong had taken a turn for the worse and died that afternoon. I stared down toward the creek, trying to come to terms with my grief as well as theirs. They weren’t having their usual glass of wine, which frankly I could have used. I can often think of the right thing to say in these situations, but the fact was that King Kong had gotten out of the house while I was there and Liza was gone. We had discussed it once, the day after his surgery. She said it could have happened to anyone, and I told her I felt terrible whenever I thought about it. Now she said the same thing again.

“It’s not your fault, Peter. Don’t beat yourself up about it.”

Honestly, I didn’t know whether to believe her. The three of us talked for a few minutes about the weather as they held hands. I decided it was best if I left them alone and headed home. I didn’t sleep much that night. I watched a couple of Cheers reruns, but it didn’t help.

I ran into Janelle and the kids at the ShopRite in Kingston a few days later and she told me Liza had called her to let the kids know. When I asked Aiden and Alexa how they were doing, I got a simple “okay,” which was to be expected. I asked them if they had plans to go back to the swimming hole anytime soon. They looked up at their Mom, who looked at me and said, “We’ll let you know.” Both kids looked back at me, and then out of the blue, Alexa said, “Can you give me a hug?” I don’t know where our conversation about mistakes fits into this, the one we had when we were searching for King Kong, but I knelt down and gave her a big hug. Janelle actually smiled. I guess that counts for something.

I don’t think I saw Liza the rest of the summer. We texted a couple of times about some work she had talked about—fixing the gutters on her garage, which didn’t look like they’d make it through the next winter. Usually, she’d respond with some sense of urgency when things needed doing. Not that summer, though finally in early October she did ask me to come by to give her an estimate for replacing her bay window. After she described the job, I asked her how she was doing with King Kong gone.

“All right,” she said. “I knew that eventually something was bound to happen.”

 It was too cold to sit out on her deck and have a glass of wine, and she didn’t invite me into the house. She never got back to me whether she was okay about the estimate.

▪ ▪ ▪

David Harris lives in the Bay Area. His stories have appeared in Valparaiso Fiction Review, Litbreak Magazine, Idle Ink, Roi Faineant Press, On the Seawall and other publications. He is a former journalist for Reuters News Agency and has worked as a corporate communications consultant and speechwriter. He is currently at work on a collection of linked short stories and serves on the board of the San Francisco Peninsula branch of the California Writers Club.

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