Before I know it, it’s Saturday and I’m supposed to go over to my father and Stephanie’s to have dinner with them. Fred is delighted that when I leave the apartment with my father he is invited too. My father has come in the middle of the afternoon. It has been arranged between my mother and him that she will be out shopping, and I’m glad of that. Mother has been saying regularly, like every night since New Year’s Eve, that she prefers to deal with Father at a distance and that that is the only civilized way to act in situations like hers. I don’t know what she’s talking about most of the time, because I know that she would like my father to have stayed with her for one of her damned drinks when he brought me home a week ago.
Father lives near Central Park, so Fred has his first genuine New York treat. From the way he begins to whimper in the taxicab when we get within a few blocks of the park, I have the eerie feeling that he knows where we are going. It’s not as warm as it was last week, but there are still a lot of people in the park. It is quiet there, almost like the country. The roads are blocked off to automobiles on weekends, so Father and I decide that it is OK to let Fred off his leash. He bolts away as though he had been kept in a cage for years. For half a minute I get worried that he will run off and get lost, except I can see that Fred keeps looking to see me and zooms back to run a wide circle around me if he gets too far away from us. Fred goes batty; he is having such a good time. He keeps throwing himself on the ground to roll over in one delectable smell after another. I can guess what he is going to smell like after the sixth or seventh roll. He is having such a good time though that I don’t want to stop him.
A little kid runs over to pet him, and he jumps up and licks the ice-cream mess left around her lips. She thinks that is the funniest thing she ever saw and falls onto the ground so that Fred can get better licks. The kid’s mother doesn’t think it’s funny though.
“Pooky!” the lady yells. “Dirty girl! What are you doing with that dirty dog?”
She grabs the kid from the ground and whacks her rear end. Fred is mystified. The kid begins to cry and babble away about the doggie at the same time. She is looking back at Fred and holding her arm out toward him as her mother drags her away. Fred runs right along with them until the lady yells at him to go away. Fred is surprised and growls a little. When I hear this, I run right over to him.
“The dog should be on a leash!” the lady shrieks. “It’s against the law to have him off the leash. There’s no telling what he might have done to Pooky!”
“I’m sorry,” I mutter as I bend down to Fred to hold him back from his new friend, who wants him even more now that her mother has told me she’s going to send me to jail if I don’t watch out. I pick up Fred and carry him over to my father. In half a minute the lady and the kid have disappeared down a path in the opposite direction, so I put Fred down and my father and I have a good laugh. Fred jumps all over us, which is, I guess, his way of laughing.
We mess around in the park for a long time. My father is all the time picking up sticks, pieces of branches from trees, and throwing them twenty or thirty feet in front of him. Fred wants to chase after them, but he won’t do it until I say “Go get it, Fred. Bring it here.” I hope my father doesn’t mind if Fred won’t run after the stick unless I tell him to. And when he brings it back, it’s to me, not Father.
A lot of dogs are off leash in the park, and Fred enjoys running up to big ones in particular and barking at them as though he is going to take them apart. A great dane starts to get frisky with Fred, who proves to be a real coward and zooms back for the protection he thinks I give him. The great dane follows Fred and jumps all over me and licks me like Fred, except that his tongue is about six times the size of Fred’s and he’s so strong that I’m almost on the ground before his master calls him back. When he is a safe distance away, Fred starts barking and growling at him again. I tell Fred he’s all noise and no action. He doesn’t understand and walks along next to us like a real hero protecting the defenseless.
