The pit bull's eyes were the color of burnt honey, and they followed me every time I walked past the chain-link. Not with hunger. With a question. The other volunteers fed him by sliding a metal bowl through a slot in the fence, like he was a deposit at a drive-through bank. Nobody opened the gate. Nobody said his name, because the one his former owner gave him made him snap at the air.
The shelter director, Renee, had worked animal control for nineteen years. She kept a coffee mug on her desk that said "I'd rather be with dogs" and a laminated sign on the wall listing the bite levels. This dog was a level four, she said. Unadoptable. Dangerous. The county would put him down when the new ordinance passed in the fall.
I'd been volunteering there since March. Tuesdays and Thursdays, four hours each. I cleaned kennels, walked the easy dogs, and tried not to get attached. I had a studio apartment in Albuquerque with a no-pets clause in the lease and a used Kia that smelled like the previous owner's air freshener no matter what I did.
The first month, I just sat outside his run and read out loud. Library books, mostly. Steinbeck. A biography of Dolly Parton. He'd lie in the back corner with his head on his paws and watch me like I was a television with the sound on.
"He bit a vet tech last year," Renee told me one afternoon. She was refilling the bleach spray. "Took three people to get him off her arm. And that was after his owner — some piece of work over in the South Valley — used him in a dogfighting ring and beat him with a two-by-four. So don't get ideas."
I got ideas.
His name was Caesar, I decided. Not the name on his intake form. Something with weight. Something that deserved better than what it got.
I started bringing boiled chicken in a Ziploc bag. The first time I slid a piece through the fence, he didn't move for a full minute. Then he stood, walked over, took it from my fingers gentler than most lap dogs, and carried it back to his corner.
Renee caught us two weeks later.
"You opened his gate."
I was standing in the dirt yard behind the kennels, and Caesar was sniffing a clump of goatheads near the back wall. He looked up when she spoke, then went back to his business.
"It was stuck," I said. "I greased the hinge."
"You let a level-four bite risk out of his enclosure."
"He didn't run."
She looked at the open gate. Then at the dog, who was now rolling on his back in the dirt with all four legs in the air. Then at me. She looked like she wanted to fire me and call 911 and sit down in the shade all at once.
"Close the gate," she said. "And if you ever do that again, I'm calling the county myself."
I closed the gate.
But here's the thing about a latch you've already greased once.
The next week, on a Thursday when Renee had left early for a dentist appointment, I opened the gate again. Caesar walked out, did a slow lap around the yard, and then — instead of coming back — he went through the gap in the fence I didn't know existed. The one behind the dumpster where the chain-link had pulled loose from the post.
I ran out the front of the shelter, heart hammering, and caught a glimpse of him half a block down Central Avenue, trotting east like he had an address in mind.
He did.
I knew the owner's address because one of the part-time kennel girls had looked it up one slow afternoon. Marcus DeWitt. Lived in a stucco house on a dirt road off Coors, with a chain-link front yard and a chained-up rottweiler puppy by the gate.
I parked three houses down. My hands shook on the steering wheel, and my mouth went dry. I could see Caesar sitting on the sidewalk in front of that house, just sitting, watching a man throw a chewed-up tennis ball to a puppy that tripped over its own feet.
The man — thirty-something, shaved head, boot-cut jeans tucked into work boots — didn't notice the pit bull at first. When he did, he laughed.
"Look at this," he said. To the dog. To the street. To nobody. "The old man came back. You stupid or something? I told you to get lost."
Caesar didn't move.
"Hey." The man walked toward him. "You forgetting what happens when you don't listen?"
He picked up a length of PVC pipe from beside the gate.
I was out of the car before I knew my legs had moved.
"Leave him alone!"
The man turned. Looked me up and down. Backyard dogfighting money, the kind of guy who keeps jumper cables in his truck as a training tool. "Who the hell are you?"
Caesar stood. Slowly, like an old engine turning over. He positioned himself between me and the man.
"You his new owner?" The man laughed again. "Good luck. Dog's broken."
He raised the pipe.
What happened next, I saw in pieces. The man swung down. Caesar didn't dodge. He went up and under the swing, took the man's forearm in his jaws, and dragged him off his feet into the dirt. The pipe clattered away. The man screamed. The rottweiler puppy yelped and hid behind a water barrel.
Caesar held the arm, then released it. He stepped back. But when the man scrambled toward the house, shouting something about a shotgun and a shovel and how he'd bury the dog in the arroyo, Caesar turned. Not to run. He trotted to the rottweiler puppy, grabbed it by the loose scruff, and looked at me.
He was taking the puppy.
I didn't think. I opened the car's back door. Caesar jumped in with the rottweiler dangling from his mouth like a suitcase, and I drove away with my foot shaking on the gas pedal.
We didn't go back to the shelter. Not that day, not ever. I knew Renee would call it in — a missing level-four, a stolen property report. But I also knew the property report would come from Marcus DeWitt, and that man wasn't going to call the police on himself.
One month later, I was living outside Tijeras, in a rented casita my cousin owned, with no pets clause. I told my cousin I was dogsitting. I told my boss at the clinic I'd moved for family. I told myself I'd figure it out.
Every morning, Caesar and the rottweiler — I named her June, because she was born in June, or at least that's what the vet guessed — ran the brush behind the house. Every evening, the three of us sat on the porch and watched the Sandias turn the color of old pennies at sunset.
Caesar still didn't let anyone but me touch him. But he slept on the rug by my bed, and when June woke me up at 3 a.m. needing to pee, he got up too, just to stand with her in the dark.
The fall came. The ordinance passed. The county shelter put down six dogs that October, and I read their names in the paper and felt something sharp behind my ribs. But not Caesar. Caesar wasn't a name on a list anymore.
When I called my cousin last week to say I was keeping both dogs, that the dogsitting story was over, she sighed. "You're the only person I know who'd steal a pit bull and a rottweiler from a dogfighter and call it a rescue."
I didn't argue.
Behind her voice on the phone, I could hear June's tags jingling against her water bowl in the kitchen, and then the scrape of Caesar's nails on the hallway tile as he came to check who I was talking to. He stopped in the doorway, looked at me for a second, and lay down across the threshold — half in the kitchen, half in the hall — right where he could watch both rooms at once.
