Houdini's Last Trick

You know how sometimes you have a decision to make and you mull over the pros and cons and then in a split second, you just go for it?

That’s what I did. The Mystery of Houdini has been bugging me. A couple of days ago I was filling up the neglected birdbath at my mom’s house. I figured by now the birds were probably dehydrated and on bird IVs somewhere. Maybe Houdini would hear the splash of water and come running around the corner of the house. I looked over at his yard and noticed his food and water dishes were in the exact same spot, so that gave me hope he was coming home. (Truthfully, he might be in the backyard, but it hasn’t been mowed in I don’t know how long, and he’s not that tall.)

Later that afternoon, I happened to be outside as the kid next door was coming home from school. (When did he get back from Arkansas? Did he even go to Arkansas? And where’s my dog?) So I was debating whether to ask about Houdini. What if he said he left him in Arkansas? What if he didn’t know where he was? What if he was hit by a car? Was I going to like what I heard? How weird was this encounter going to be for both me and the kid?

Talk to him. Don’t talk to him. Talk to him. Don’t talk to him. Okay, now it’s getting weird. He’s going in the house and you’ll lose your opportunity. Let it go; the mystery of Houdini is in the not knowing.

And so in a split second, I did it. “Hey, where’s your dog been? I haven’t seen him around the yard.”

And in a split second, it happened. “We lost him.”

Lost him? How do you lose a dog that never leaves home? I had visions of him wandering off at some roadside rest stop on the way to Arkansas. (Seriously, I have got to let the Arkansas thing go.)

Deeper in I waded. “Oh no! What happened to him?”

“I don’t know. He just left and never came back.”

In that moment, I had to be the grown-up and pull it together. I told the kid I was sorry to hear that and that he was a good dog. He said “thanks” in a way that was not sad enough to soothe me. But then again, he’s had a lot more time to get over this loss. I wanted to scream, “Why didn’t you have a collar and tags on him? Then he wouldn’t be lost!” But it’s not my dog or my kid or my responsibility.

Growing up, I had a cat named Lyndon. (Texas. In the ‘60s.) I think there may have been other cats pre-Lyndon, but they all met the same fate. My dad would take them “to the yard.” He took them to run around and catch mice at the construction company where he worked. I like to think the cats lived a life of bliss, catching mice and enjoying the love and belly rubs of burly men who operated heavy machinery for a living. In our house, though (even now), “taking it to the yard” is a euphemism for crossing into The Great Unknown.

I have questions. Houdini wouldn’t run away. Hell, he never went farther than our yard. He never chased cars. Occasionally, he’d trot behind the mailman, but only for one house and then he came galloping back. The only time he crossed the street was to follow me to the pool. Plus, the kid didn’t say he got hit by a car. He didn’t say he ran off. “We lost him.” Houdini was the type of dog who would probably jump into the first car that offered him a ride, but it’s not like he was a champion show dog, so I can’t really imagine someone driving by to dognap him. Had the kid’s mom taken Houdini to The Yard?

We lost him.

Houdini is lost.

When I heard the news, I immediately ran into the house and fired up my computer to the Facebook page for lost dogs in the area. He’s been missing for awhile now, so I knew it was unlikely he’d be there, and if someone had found him, he’d be at the pound by now. I quickly scrolled, stopping at every black dog I saw. (BTW, a lot of pit bulls get loose in my mom’s neighborhood. This does not make me want to do long training walks around here.) I stopped myself after a couple of minutes because this isn’t my dog to find. And what if I did find him? Was I going to run next door and say, “Hey, I ran inside to scour Facebook and I found our dog!”?

So I stopped. Because “we lost him.”

The kid said a few weeks back that Houdini (well, I think he called him Spider at the time) was such a homebody that if they left him in Arkansas, he’d just find his way back here.

Is that true?

When a magician dies, there is something called a “broken-wand ceremony,” where the magician’s wand is broken to signify the end of the magic.

I suppose I could hold the Houdini equivalent of a broken-wand ceremony. I could take down the barriers from my mom’s side of the fence. I could remove the yellow Post-It from the back door (which looks all the more strange given that there’s no dog there).

I guess Houdini’s last, and perhaps most impressive trick, is that he turned me into a dog person.