Matteus told me he believed the dog was stolen. One moment it was with him outside the corner grocery on Mission, on the sidewalk where he spends his days waiting to see Camila, the next, gone. I’m a store regular. I know it gets busy. Maybe a customer snatched it. Maybe one of those who are his usual company on the corner did. He calls them “the Crazies,” says he can’t keep tabs on the thoughts in their heads or their comings and goings. He’d been deep in conversation, as he often was, and the dog had never left his side on its own. What puzzled him was, if it was stolen, how was it without a yelp or whimper?
I told him I’d look out for it. I promised I’d ask my wife Rae to. I’d introduced her to him once, before he had the dog. She’d called Matteus a “character” then, which didn’t seem negative. This turned to, “I don’t get why you waste a moment with him,” which was, and fit her trend, later.
The dog’s name is Ouriço, Portuguese for hedgehog, Matteus says. It’s small, nervous, some terrier, pointy-eared, dark-eyed, bearded. Its coat is a complete disarray of brown and black. It resembles its namesake only in being low to the ground and having spiky fur, if nothing like real spines. It has that officious look terriers get. “Tough being in charge,” I said to Matteus about its nervousness.
“And he is,” Matteus said.
Ouriço stayed close to Matteus no doubt because the corner was often full of feet, at the intersection of a major thoroughfare and a lesser, by a busy bus stop and across from three others, and outside the busy grocery. Sometimes the dog was in his arms, above the scrum; better height from which to rule. It was on the ground when it disappeared. Matteus described to me the conversation that engaged him just then, something about satellites, their cameras, and the uses of back yards, much as I could follow, and then he looked down, and no dog. Up the four directions the streets take from the intersection, the actual cardinal directions, and also down the alley that splits off across from the grocery, these five ways he saw nothing but human legs on the sidewalks. He wanted to chase the thief, but which legs, which way?
So to his daily daylong presence on the corner he added interrogation of anyone who would listen, “Have you seen my dog?” with description, if the passerby was a stranger, or “Do you know how much it hurts me the runt’s gone?” if an acquaintance.
Being the latter for some years, I can piece together an account of Matteus’s life.
He’s from a Portuguese family that in extended version has dairy farms in the San Joaquin Valley and on the north coast. They came early in the twentieth century; he’s third generation, from the north coast branch. He wanted no part of dairy farming. “Milk don’t take vacations,” he says. He knew the City, his family brought him here for Christmas shopping and special occasions. A high school friend of his moved down and got into the Painters Union apprenticeship and a Mission District apartment. He had room on the couch for Matteus. He followed the friend into the City and the trade.
When I first met him, on the corner where Ouriço was stolen, he was somewhere in his fifties, and already on a disability retirement. Easy to imagine how. Five-gallon buckets, forty pounds day in, day out, and up and down ladders and scaffolds, and hands over head hours on end sometimes. Plenty of opportunities for falls, too. And decades of solvents. What a lifetime of volatile hydrocarbons does to synapses, and so to thought processes: I’m sure there are studies. There should be more. I’ve known my share of painters. I have hypotheses.
No one would call Matteus handsome. Maybe he was, once. At what point does it happen, when a man goes from handsome to … not ugly, really, just tattered and loose, like old overalls? In the mirror the shock of hair above my forehead has become less assertive, the bulb at the end of my nose more. Rae began looking at me differently a while ago. Was this from seventeen years of marriage, or did my looks cross some line apparent to her but not me? Stare at Matteus – I can sometimes, he gets so deep into some topic with the Crazies; once it was about the possible evolution of blind pigmentless lifeforms in the buried creeks of San Francisco, one of which flows two blocks from the grocery – someone could imagine him with a crown of wavy brown hair instead of the scruff of dark gray that implies a wave only because he can never comb it into shape; bright hazel eyes instead of the half-focused things fighting back dark eyelids; cheeks that had clear bones and clear olive skin and weren’t yet formless, swollen, spotted, dark-stubbled.
Rae and I took a Saturday and walked looking for the dog. Rae claimed she’d never seen it.
“It was with him years,” I said.
“Never paid attention,” she told me.
So I described it best I could. We searched awhile together. Then she insisted we split up. “We’ll cover more streets that way.”
“But you hardly know what the dog looks like.”
Didn’t matter to her. Off we went separate ways, and she might have been looking for something very different than me. She was home before me. We’d both failed. I reported this to Matteus. There was something sweet in his eyes when he thanked me.
I imagine Camila saw this sweetness when they got together, when he couldn’t have been a pretty boy anymore, but likely wasn’t what he is now. Camila is how he came to the neighborhood. About his age, gorgeous dark eyes, maybe a little better shape than him, and she’s let her hair go salt-and-pepper, which becomes her. She inherited a house from her mother. She was working in some government accounting office in Civic Center, and he was doing a job in the building. They hit it off. Some months later, he moved into the house. That worked a few years, then didn’t. Meanwhile he’d taken the disability retirement. Rents had gone way up in the neighborhood in their time together. The retirement wouldn’t get him even a hole in the Tenderloin. He found a room across the Bay in Oakland.
“But I still have to see Cammy,” he says, “even if.”
So he commutes early on BART every weekday, so he can see her come down to the bus stop to go to work, then stays to see her get back. She’s across the street, they don’t talk, he says, but she hasn’t changed routines to avoid him.
“She looks at me,” he says. “I look back. I’ll take that.”
Between her going and coming he spends the day outside the grocery with his Crazies. “Double commute’s too pricey on what I get,” he says. “And what else would I do with my days?”
I understand the question. Rae and I had just the evenings and weekends to fill, and that became a challenge; more for her, I think, than for me. Early on I wanted to hit clubs, but she didn’t follow bands, I couldn’t talk her into any of them. She had the idea of going to the ballet and that worked during the season for a couple years. She got tired of it. Musicals, same thing. We stopped going to movies early in the pandemic. She didn’t want to start again when things got better. She hates television. Half the books she reads she tosses before she’s half through. I became the entertainment, and I’m not much. I can talk construction project management all evening and Saturday into Sunday, it makes me happy, but I’d lose her in minutes. She talked sometimes about “growing.” I have no clue what that means. Really, I’m fine with just being. She began working late more often anyway, but she refused to talk about the bank where she worked. She wanted to leave work at work, she said.
On a whim one night I asked Matteus for good evening conversation topics. What was the corner discussing?
“Oh man, I’m so screwed up about Ouriço I haven’t thought about hardly nothing else,” he said.
So I went on boring Rae by talking about a bird I saw or the new Muni buses or the big-wave surf contest at Maverick’s. She’d look down, away, I’d be talking to a head of dyed-brown hair. I’d had an awful week few weeks back. The wine at Friday dinner was good. After a second glass it was easy to pour a third. I was talking to the hair again and found myself saying, “You’re like Matteus’s pup Ouriço. You go somewhere and I can’t tell where.”
That turned her my way. “Could you have made a more offensive comparison?” she said.
Which, fair question.
But I wasn’t boring her.
The next Tuesday, getting home from work – construction hours usually get me home earlier than the main commute – I ran into Matteus away from his corner, well uphill into the neighborhood.
“Marty said he saw Ouriço on this block, walking with someone,” he told me. He was flushed scary red through the spots and stubble. I guessed he’d come running and wasn’t used even to much walking anymore. He seemed about to cry. “Marty said Ouriço wasn’t even on a leash. He was just walking with some guy.” I knew who Marty was, a Crazy.
“I’ll keep an eye out. Marty say what the guy looked like?” I asked.
“Short,” Matteus said.
“That’s useful,” I told him.
“All I got,” he said.
It was my turn for dinner that night, and I had a red butterhead lettuce and fresh basil I’d picked up at lunchtime at the Ferry Building Farmers Market, near my office. I had a salad and rotini with pesto ready for the time Rae’d usually be home and cleaned up.
That time passed, and more.
“We had a push to get an investor package together,” she told me when she got in.
There was more on her breath than words. The “push” had apparently involved alcohol. I nuked her pasta in the microwave, not the best but best I could do. I’d gone ahead and eaten already. I poured wine so I’d have something to sit with at the table with her, fourth glass this time. I told her about Matteus coming up to look for the dog and its walking with someone else.
“Seemed like he felt he was being cheated on,” I told her.
I saw her chewing slow down.
“Maybe you have some idea. Was he being cheated on?” I asked.
She chewed another forkful and swallowed. She sipped wine. She didn’t look at me.
“Is he short?” I said.
I never want to hear that laugh again; hard sawblade thing. “That’s not a question you should ask,” she said.
I have the small bedroom now. The house is listed. We have offers, two we like. We’re together, if you can call it that, while we decide between them. I make my dinner. She eats out. There’s a second bath downstairs; good thing.
It’s possible we won’t see each other again once the attorneys have done their thing and, good adults, we’ve signed the necessary docs.
I stopped the other evening to talk to Matteus, and there was the dog, trembling by his ankle.
“Who brought him back?” I asked.
He shrugged. “I was talking,” he said, “to Twan” – another Crazy, I guess – “about how I heard the Pomos up where I was a kid thought the grizzly was man’s equal, and I’m sure a grizzly thinks, but does it think of itself? and he says, ‘Look who’s back!’ I turn and look down and there he is, like he never left.” He looked at the dog. “Little shit,” he said, with love in his voice. He looks at me. “You moving?”
“So it seems,” I told him.
“You never know,” he said. “Look at me and Ouriço. She might want to get back with you.”
“You’re a lucky man,” I told him.
“Hell yeah I am,” he said.
Camila was in the crowd getting off the bus at the stop catty-corner just then. As she crossed Mission and started uphill he stopped talking to look at her and she looked at him. No smiles, no frowns. Just, she knew he saw her and he knew she saw him. Maybe this wasn’t love. It did seem like respect.
This is his life now, the commutes to and from their recognitions at each end of the day, and between these the dog maybe faithless but back and Matteus’s detailed examinations of life and the world with the Crazies, like a low-rent Socrates in a low-rent agora. I can’t say it’s a bad life. Not unhappy, for sure.
Enviable, even, in its way.
~
Michael Thériault has been an Ironworker, union organizer, and union representative at various levels. He published fiction in his twenties, half a dozen stories in literary magazines, but abandoned it for decades to support first a family, then a movement. In the last of his union positions he did produce more than thirteen years of monthly columns for Organized Labor, newspaper of the San Francisco Building and Construction Trades Council since 1900. In his recent return to fiction, since 2022 his stories have been accepted by numerous publications, among them Pacifica Literary Review, Overheard, and Sky Island Journal. His story “An Invitation to the Gulls” was shortlisted lately for the Leopold Bloom Prize for Innovative Narration. Popula.com has published his brief memoir of Ironworker organizing. He is a graduate of St. John’s College, Santa Fe and San Francisco native and resident.