Good Boy, Scurvy

(tongue)
photo by C Buckley.

Last week my dog threw up a diamond ring. It was an engagement ring, three round cut stones set in white gold, entangled with a weave of grass and bile from my dog’s stomach. Scurvy likes to eat grass in the spring, then pukes it up on the living room carpet or on the kitchen floor

I put on dish gloves, picked the ring out of the vomit, cleaned it as best I could over the garbage can and then rinsed it off in the sink. Scurvy sat by the sink the whole time, wagging his tale, thumping against the cupboards. Yes Scurvy, good boy.

I asked the neighbor lady if she had lost a ring recently. Nope, she said, where did you find it? Well….

I keep the ring in my pocket in case I come across somebody I suspect it belongs to. Like a worry stone, I find myself running my fingers over its edges from deep inside my pockets. It started to fray the front of all my slacks. Whenever I was at a store and needed to fish out change, it would come out in the handful of coins, and I’d get a strange look from the cashier. I’d stick it back in my pocket, smile off-handedly, and take my bag and leave.

I take it out and looked at it absently while I watch television. I am not sure if it is a real diamond or what it is worth, but that doesn’t matter. Scurvy threw up against three days afterward, and I found myself picking through it to see what he’d brought me this time. Just more grass, pebbles, an undigested piece of rawhide. He wagged his tale just as enthusiastically as I cleaned up the mess. I guess the difference in value between a chewed rawhide bone and a diamond ring meant nothing to him.

I drew up a Ring Found poster and made a dozen copies at a nearby Kinko’s, then tacked them up to utility poles within a three block radius. I figure that’s about as far as scurvy gets when he runs away. Within three days I got seven calls. None of the callers could correctly describe the ring. With each made-up story I grew less and less fond of my neighbors. One woman said she had been in an argument with her boyfriend and he had torn it off her finger and thrown it away, and she’d needed stitches. Another said she had lost it while helping an elderly lady from a taxi to the front of her house. A young man said that he’d bought it to propose to his sweetheart but had thrown it from the car window after she’d turned him down. I almost wanted to give it to him, but then I would never get the ring to who it really belonged to.

A woman showed up at my front door this morning, her arms crossed over her chest as though she was cold, but it was quite warm out. She wore sweatpants and a baseball cap with wisps of hair peeking out. It looked like she was balding underneath the cap. Her eyes were sunken and her skin grey. She smiled wanly at me and said she’d heard from her neighbor that I’d found a diamond ring. She told me hers had kept slipping off of her finger lately. She looked apologetically at me, shrugged her shoulders that poked through her sweatshirt. She said she could describe it for me, and started to, but I told her no. No need to go into details. I handed her the ring, and she closed her fingers over it. She said maybe she should wear it on a necklace for now on, at least until…but she didn’t finish. Scurvy was beside the door, thumping his tail against the floor and panting. She leaned down and petted him. What’s his name, she asked? Scout, I said. Good boy, Scout.