Tough Day for the Army Read Online Free PDF Page A

couple how to love unconditionally so they could be good parents and even better people. In the first Marley book, Marley’s owner says, “Marley taught me about living each day with unbridled exuberance and joy, about seizing the moment and following your heart.” But I read that book and watched about eighteen minutes of the movie inspired by it, and mostly what I think Marley teaches us is that, as long as you’re a dog, you can get away with being a total raging asshole.
    You can say a lot of things about my dog, but he’s no asshole.
    One of the books is about a dog who rescued people from the Twin Towers. Out of patriotic duty I brought that one home, but I don’t really want to read it. I have a hunch I’m not alone on that front. My dog never rescued anybody. Au contraire , I rescued him, and from his perspective it was a real lottery moment, given the odds, you know, the sheer number of his canine brethren lined up in cages stacked from floor to ceiling at the shelter he called home at the time. I went down a row, peering into each cage at the candidate inside. Some barked viciously, others barked friendishly. Some pressed their noses or paws to the bars. The dark concrete floor had a drain in it, and I knew what that was for. A woman who volunteered at the shelter was following me, offering a kind of color commentary about each of the dogs: “This one likes his belly scratched.” “She just loves to cuddle.” “He’s great with children.” I wondered how she knew all this stuff about these dogs. Maybe she took them home for a test drive, like car salesmen will do with the new models so they can speak knowledgeably to customers about handling and acceleration.
    I said to her, “Which one goes zero to sixty fastest?”
    â€œWe have some greyhounds in the pens outside,” she replied, and I realized that once again, I’d made most of the joke in my head. The woman looked like one of those people who used to be really overweight but then got the stomach surgery so they deflate, but what’s left is a sort of skin sack that the fatter person used to live in. I admired the sacrifice, the dedication it must have taken to see the process through, but it didn’t look good on her.
    I figured the woman might be too ugly to love, something I often feared about myself.
    A basset hound. That’s what she looked like.
    Being ugly in the dog world is actually a virtue. The books about the dogs that save things often have pictures of these dogs on the cover and very few are classically handsome. In fact, the odder-looking the dog, the more people it seems to have saved. One of the dog book stars, a pitbull mix, was missing an ear and had a jagged scar circling one eye, like someone had tried to carve the eye out of his head with something simultaneously sharp and dull. This dog had saved himself as well as several others because of his indomitable spirit. Based on his looks, if this dog was a human and an actor, he’d be playing junkies and pederasts exclusively, but at the bookstore I saw one young and pretty girl disengage from the boyfriend whose arm she had been clutching so she could pick up the book and coo at the cover image. Soooooo cute.
    The barking from all the desperate shelter dogs was like static in my ears and the smell of piss and disinfectant was like static in my nose, and there at the end of the row in a cage at eye height was Oscar. He was sitting upright, mostly alert, looking straight at me. His eyes were and are black, unexpressive, but very, very deep, like two pools of oil. The placard on the cage called him “Fluffy,” but I saw through that.
    â€œThis one doesn’t do much,” the woman said.
    â€œI can relate,” I said.
    She looked at the floor. I figured maybe she could relate too.
    â€œHis name is Oscar,” I said.
    She put some glasses that had been dangling around her neck by a chain up onto