A Thousand Naked Strangers - Kevin Hazzard Page 0,32

like dogs more than I like most people. Why not?

We pull up to a run-down little house, unpainted, with a sagging roof. There’s no grass; the front lawn is nothing but clay. Weeds fan out for acres from the other three sides. Standing on the porch in a housedress and slippers is the smallest, oldest woman I’ve ever seen. We hop out. She’s nervous but not overly excited and tells us she tossed a T-bone to her dog, JJ, and he swallowed it. Whole.

Chris looks around. “How big is JJ?”

“Pretty big,” she says.

There’s a doghouse in the middle of the yard, and next to it is a four-foot stake driven two feet into the clay. A chain thick enough to tow a barge is wrapped around the stake and pulled tight. It stretches across the yard and disappears into the weeds.

“He on the end of that?” Chris asks.

“ ’Less he broke it again.”

“He can break that?”

“If he has a mind to.”

“He mean?”

“Depends.”

And just like that, the chain goes slack. JJ is coming home. I start to sweat. Chris backs up. JJ bursts through the weeds like a rampaging elephant. A gray pit with the head of a tiger shark and the muscled shoulders of a Spanish bull. Every ounce of ninety pounds. We’re well within his perimeter, and there’s no time to react. He’s on us before we even hear the rattle of his heavy chain. He jumps and—to both our relief and our shock—lands on his side, just short of us, with a heavy thud. He digs furiously at his mouth with his front paws, scrambles to his feet, eyes wild, then throws himself down again. He knows he’s dying, and he’s terrified.

Choking is a scary thing. Imagine being wide awake but unable to breathe, fully alert and fully aware that this is it. To find a comparably miserable death, you’d have to be eaten or beaten or burned alive. Choking is violent and desperate right up until the moment it isn’t—that moment being death.

JJ’s not there, but he’s close. We have to do something, but we have no idea what. Were he a person and not a dog, this would be so much easier. I’d simply place a hand on his shoulder and ask, “Are you choking?” Seriously. That’s the first step of the Heimlich, to approach the patient and make sure he is, in fact, choking. Imagine the look of abject terror on the choker’s face temporarily being replaced by the shocked and put-out expression of pure frustration. If he can manage a grunt or a wheeze—even if he says, “I’m choking”—he’s not choking. For those who are choking, whose airway is so blocked that they can’t squeeze out so much as a syllable, we start the Heimlich. If the patient is human. Which JJ isn’t. He’s a dog. A big one.

And so how do you save a creature that might, once saved, tear you apart? I look at Chris. He looks at me. There’s no manual for saving dogs, no canine Heimlich, no precedent of any kind for how to deal with a giant choking dog. But he’s choking. I drop the bag, fall to my knees, peek into his huge mouth. Beyond the muscular jaws, beyond the rows of teeth, beyond the enormous flapping tongue, I can see the bone. He swallowed it whole. Imagine a T-bone divested of meat. The thick crossbar running sideways up top, the long, skinny shaft curving down. The shaft is in his throat, and the crossbar is stuck at the back of his mouth. He’s desperate and furious, and getting it out means reaching into the area most likely to do us serious damage.

Chris doesn’t want to do it. Neither do I. JJ is massive. That mouth, those teeth. But he’s panicking. And choking. We inch closer. At our approach, JJ—still on his side—thumps his tail against the clay. We’re obligated to help. Maybe not as medics but as people. Chris grabs the forceps, asks how we’re going to do this.

“I thought you had a plan.”

“Do I look like I have a plan?”

“You have the forceps.”

He holds them out. “You want ’em?”

“No.”

JJ is back up, head shaking, desperate. He flops down and tries to get up again but can’t. How much time we have, how blocked his airway is, we don’t know. We also don’t know how he’ll react to us shoving our hands in his mouth. He spins frantically in the clay, and the old woman whimpers. Since we