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had left Brooklyn twice, had returned to Brooklyn twice, and in that time Willy had developed the keenest, most ardent affection for his four-legged friend. Not only did he feel protected now, and not only was he glad to have someone to talk to, and not only did it comfort him to have a warm body to curl up against at night, but after living with the dog at such close quarters for so many months, Willy had judged him to be wholly and incorruptibly good. It wasn’t just that he knew that Mr. Bones had a soul. He knew that soul to be better than other souls, and the more he saw of it, the more refinement and nobility of spirit he found there. Was Mr. Bones an angel trapped in the flesh of a dog? Willy thought so. After eighteen months of the most intimate, clear-eyed observations, he felt certain of it. How else to interpret the celestial pun that echoed in his mind night and day? To decode the message, all you had to do was hold it up to a mirror. Could anything be more obvious? Just turn around the letters of the word dog, and what did you have? The truth, that’s what. The lowest being contained within his name the power of the highest being, the almighty artificer of all things. Was that why the dog had been sent to him? Was Mr. Bones, in fact, the second coming of the force that had delivered Santa Claus to him on that December night in 1969? Perhaps. And then again, perhaps not. To anyone else, the matter would have been open to debate. To Willy— precisely because he was Willy—it wasn’t.
    Still and all, Mr. Bones was a dog. From the tip of his tail to the end of his snout, he was a pure example of Canis familiaris , and whatever divine presence he might have harbored within his skin, he was first and foremost the thing he appeared to be. Mr. Bow Wow, Monsieur Woof Woof, Sir Cur. As one wag neatly put it to Willy in a Chicago bar four or five summers back: “You want to know what a dog’s philosophy of life is, pal? I’ll tell you what it is. Just one short sentence: If you can’t eat it or screw it, piss on it.’ “
    Willy had no problem with that. Who knew what theological mysteries were at work in a case like this? If God had sent his son down to earth in the form of a man, why shouldn’t an angel come down to earth in the form of a dog? Mr. Bones was a dog, and the truth was that Willy took pleasure in that dogness, found no end of delight in watching the spectacle of his confrere’s canine habits. Willy had never kept company with an animal before. As a boy, his parents had turned him down every time he’d asked for a pet. Cats, turtles, parakeets, hamsters, goldfish—they would have nothing to do with them. The apartment was too small, they said, or animals stank, or they cost money, or Willy wasn’t responsible enough. As a result, until Mr. Bones came into his life, he had never had the opportunity to observe a dog’s behavior at close hand, had never even bothered to give the subject much thought. Dogs were no more than dim presences to him, shadowy figures hovering at the edge of consciousness. You avoided the ones who barked at you, you patted the ones who licked you. That was the extent of his knowledge. Two months after his thirty-eighth birthday, all that suddenly changed.
    There was so much to absorb, so much evidence to assimilate, decipher, and make sense of that Willy hardly knew where to begin. The wagging tail as opposed to the tail between the legs. The pricked ears as opposed to the flaccid ears. The rolling onto the back, the running in circles, the anus-sniffs and growls, the kangaroo-hops and midair turns, the stalking crouch, the bared teeth, the cocked head, and a hundred other minute particulars, each one an expression of a thought, a feeling, a plan, an urge. It was like learning how to speak a new language, Willy found, like stumbling onto a long-lost tribe of primitive men and having to figure out their impenetrable mores and customs. Once he had surmounted the initial