For a while we have a little dog who comes on the walks with us. At night he sleeps in the laundry room. In the daytime he stays outside. I talk to him like he is a person, because I just talk and talk and never shut up. At a certain point this little dog gets a skin disease, and when my mom and my brother and me go on a vacation to Taos, New Mexico, my dad stays home, and the little dog disappears.
This is the year my brother is in a very bad way. He sits in the back of the car for the whole vacation and talks to no one, and I can’t remember if he is heartsick or body sick or both. We go all over New Mexico, and especially I like Taos because there are Kachina dolls everywhere, and I am partial to the Kachina dolls. I get one on a beaded necklace and one on a coin purse and one that is just loose. We also go to the pueblo where they still make bread in clay ovens, and you buy the bread, and eat the bread, which is the best bread I have ever tasted before or since, I think. In Taos, there are more mountains than I have seen before, and we go up into the mountains and park near a stream, and I am allowed to wade in the stream in my romper even though it is ice-cold freezing. My brother sits in the car during this. Then, I think, all of us get food poisoned in a fancy restaurant in Santa Fe, and then we drive home. It is hard to imagine how this happens, though, since I only eat croutons from a salad bar. I am going through a phase of only eating croutons. The hard part about New Mexico is finding the croutons. Luckily, I will consent to eating sopaipillas if heavily slathered in honey.
When we get back home, no more little dog. My dad claims he has been poisoned by a neighbor. It seemed unlikely to me, even then.
In those days, folks made it hard for us to love our dogs as we do now, out in the open.
McCloud is from Taos, New Mexico, I am told. It is there he learned to ride a horse.