Until Tuesday Read Online Free PDF Page B

more about timing than anything,” he admitted. Tom’s previous Labrador retriever had recently graduated to become an explosives-detection dog for Homeland Security, and he hated being without a dog.
    The dogs brought it all back to, you know, to the human side.
    Tom didn’t cajole Tuesday. He didn’t leash him. Instead, he climbed under Steve Buscemi’s bunk and lay down beside him. Tuesday was about fifty pounds at the time, not the eighty he is today, so there was just enough room. Tom touched his paws and occasionally petted him behind the ears, but mostly he lay quietly, not saying a word. When he got up three hours later, Tuesday got up too and followed him back to their new home. He put his front paws on Tom’s bunk, accepted a pat on the head and a “that’s a good boy,” then lay down in the kennel in the corner of the cell.
    From then on, Tuesday was always at Tom’s side. He leaned on him as they walked together, and he sat with his head drooped on Tom’s lap in the television room. At night, he nuzzled Tom as he got into his bunk, then curled in the kennel to sleep. In the courtyard, when he was supposed to be training, he jumped on the bench and scrunched as close as he could to Tom’s side. Nobody, not even Tom, had ever seen anything like it. Tuesday has such sad eyes, especially when he’s wounded, that at seven months old he probably looked like exactly what he was: a lost kid. When I think of him then, I see a perfect picture of longing, of innocence at the moment it discovers there is pain in the world.
    The other inmates started calling Tuesday soft. “What are you doing with that pansy, Tom?” they’d joke as they walked their hulking Labrador retrievers at their heel. “Get a real dog.” They bet him the only things available, cigarettes and chocolate bars, that Tuesday would never make it.
    Tom didn’t mind. He believed in Tuesday. The dog was sensitive, sure, but he was also smart and intuitive. Tom was sixty years old, with thirty years in the joint, so he knew there was no need to rush. Heartbreak and crime are instantaneous. Transformation takes time, especially a transformation of the heart, so he was willing to shamble with Tuesday at his side, taking good-hearted abuse from the young guys and knowing from experience that the old dog always knows the best way to come out on top, even when his muscles are growing slack and his step isn’t what it used to be.
    Of course, Tuesday’s obstinance could only go on for so long before he flunked out, so Tom drilled Tuesday on his commands. He didn’t overwork him. He had seen guys in prison burn out dogs by working them too hard, and he’d seen them burn themselves out, too. He took it slow but steady, trying to make the training fun, but after a month there was still no progress. Tuesday watched, his eyebrows bobbing as he listened to the words, but his sad eyes stared up at Tom as if to ask, Why? Why bother?
    “He knew everything,” Tom said, “but would not respond. He just did not want to do it.”
    Any kind of training, whether to be a service dog, an accountant, or a soldier in the U.S. Army, takes desire. To learn a job well, you must want to succeed. This is the basis of Lu Picard’s training methods: to make the task the connection to happiness. This work-reward relationship is inherent in dogs. As pack animals, they are conditioned to being judged on their contribution to a group.
    Tuesday lost the connection. In his mind, he had followed commands for six months. He had been a good dog, and what had it gotten him? He had been passed from pack to pack, and when he finally found someone to accept him, he was kicked aside.
    After a few weeks, Tom realized he wasn’t going to be able to train Tuesday the traditional way. He was mulling this over, and possibly mourning all those lost cigarette bets, when he noticed the inflatable swimming pool in the prison yard. The pool had been brought in by Puppies Behind Bars as a