My Brother-In-Law Called My Little Rescue Mutt A “Useless Rat With A Beard” And Told Me To Leave Him Home From My Sister’s 70Th Birthday Weekend. Then He Lost His Only Truck Key On A Lake Trail At Sunset, And Everybody Turned Around And Looked At The Dog

My dog’s name is Pickles, and I’ll be honest with you, he is not much to look at.

He’s a wiry-haired terrier mix, maybe twenty pounds, the color of a paper grocery sack, with a gray beard that sticks out in every direction like he’s just been electrocuted. One ear stands up. The other one gave up years ago. He has an underbite. When he’s happy, which is most of the time, his whole back half wags, and when he’s thinking, he tilts his head so far to one side I’m afraid it’s going to come off.

I got him from the county shelter in Springfield, Missouri, six years ago. He’d been there four months. The girl at the front desk told me two families had brought him back. One said he was “too busy.” The other said he “kept finding things.” I didn’t know then what that meant. I do now.

I’m Ruthanne Beckett. I’m sixty-six. I taught third grade for thirty-four years and I live alone in a little brick ranch house on the south side of Springfield, and I am not ashamed to tell you that this scruffy, underbit, one-eared dog is the best friend I have.

He finds things. That’s what the family meant. He finds everything. If I drop an earring behind the dresser, Pickles finds it. If I set my reading glasses down somewhere and walk away, he brings them to me. Gently, by the earpiece, without a tooth mark on them. The first winter I had him, I lost the spare key to my car and tore the house apart for two days, and on the third morning I woke up and it was lying on my pillow, next to my face, and Pickles was sitting at the foot of the bed looking extremely pleased with himself.

So I started a game with him. When my grandkids came over, I’d hide one of their socks somewhere in the backyard, let Pickles sniff the other one, and say, “Find it.” He’d put his nose down and go, zigzagging across the grass like a little wind-up toy, and two minutes later he’d come trotting back with the sock in his mouth and drop it at the kids’ feet and they would scream like he’d done a magic trick.

I never thought of it as anything but a game.

Randall

My sister Joanne has been married to Randall Pike for forty-four years.

Randall sells commercial insurance. He’s a big man with a big voice and a big silver pickup truck that he washes every Saturday morning in his driveway with his shirt off, which nobody in the neighborhood has asked him to do. He’s the kind of man who tells you what he paid for things. He’s not cruel, exactly. He’s just never had a thought he didn’t say out loud.

He has never liked Pickles.

The first time he met him, at Joanne’s house on Thanksgiving, he looked down at my dog and laughed out loud.

“What is that?” he said. “Ruthie, you paid money for that? That’s a rat with a beard.”

“He was free,” I said.

“Well, you got ripped off.”

Every family gathering since, it’s been something. Pickles is a “dust mop.” Pickles is “the ugliest dog in Greene County.” Once, at my grandson’s birthday party, Randall told a table full of people that Pickles was “the dog nobody wanted, twice,” and laughed so hard he had to set his beer down.

I’d just smile and change the subject. Joanne would give me a look across the room that meant, I’m sorry, you know how he is. And I did know how he was. He was family.

The Birthday Weekend

This past October, Joanne turned seventy, and her daughter rented a big log cabin on Table Rock Lake for the whole family to go down for the weekend. Three generations. Fourteen of us, counting the grandkids. The listing said pets welcome, and I’d already told my niece I was bringing Pickles, and she’d said, “Of course, Aunt Ruthie. The kids love him.”

Two days before we left, Randall called me.

“Ruthie,” he said. “About the dog.”

“What about him?”

“Joanne’s turning seventy. It’s a big deal. I’ve got the whole thing planned. Dinner on the deck, the cake, the slideshow. I don’t need that mutt underfoot, barking at the deer and tracking mud everywhere. Leave him at home. Get your neighbor to feed him.”

“Randall, he doesn’t bark at deer. He doesn’t bark at anything.”

“He’s useless, Ruthie. He’s a useless little rat with a beard and he’s going to get in the way. Do this for your sister.”

I almost did it. I want to be honest. I sat in my kitchen after I hung up and I almost called my neighbor.

Then Joanne called me herself, ten minutes later. She’d heard him from the other room.

“You bring that dog,” my sister said. “It’s my birthday. And I want him there.”

So I brought him.

That first night, Randall grilled burgers on the deck and held court the way he always does. He told the story about the time he sold a policy to a man who owned eleven car washes. He told the one about the fish he almost caught in 1994. And every time Pickles wandered past his chair, he made a point of moving his feet like a rat had run by.

“Watch it,” he’d say. “Don’t let that thing near the food.”

Pickles, for the record, has never once stolen food. He was lying under my chair with his chin on my shoe the entire meal. But the grandkids laughed, because grandkids laugh at whatever Grandpa does, and Randall liked that, so he kept it up.

Later, when everybody was inside playing cards, I sat out on the deck steps with Pickles and a cup of decaf. Joanne came out with two blankets and sat down next to me, the way she used to sit next to me on the porch steps when we were girls.

“He doesn’t mean it,” she said.

“He means it a little,” I said.

She was quiet for a while. Then she said, “He had a dog once. When he was a boy. He doesn’t talk about it.”

I didn’t know that. In forty-four years, I had never heard a word about it. I wanted to ask more, but she just patted Pickles on the head and went back inside, and I sat there wondering what kind of man spends his whole life being mean to dogs because of one he lost.

The Trail

The first day was lovely. Randall grumbled when he saw Pickles hop out of my car, but Joanne gave him a look, and he let it go. The grandkids took Pickles down to the dock and threw sticks into the water, and he watched the sticks float away with great interest and did not go in after a single one, because Pickles does not swim. He considers it beneath him.

On Saturday afternoon, Randall decided we were all going on a hike.

There’s a trail near the cabin that winds up through the woods along the lake to a rocky overlook, about three miles up and back. Randall had read about it online. He wanted to take a family picture up there at sunset for Joanne’s birthday, with the lake behind us.

“Everybody in the truck,” he said. “Ruthie, the dog stays.”

“The dog comes,” said Joanne.

So the dog came.

We packed into Randall’s big silver truck and my niece’s SUV and drove the ten minutes to the trailhead. It was a small gravel lot at the end of a dirt road, with no signal on anybody’s phone. We hiked up through the oak trees and the fallen leaves with the grandkids running ahead, and Pickles trotting along at my heel, his beard full of burrs, his nose down the whole time, reading the trail like the morning paper.

At the overlook, Randall arranged us all on the rocks. He set his phone up on a little tripod and fussed with it for ten minutes, and then he took about forty pictures, and we all smiled until our faces hurt, and the sun went down orange and pink over the water. I’ll admit it was beautiful.

Then we started back down.

The Key

We were almost to the trailhead when Randall stopped walking and started patting his pockets.

Jacket. Jeans. Back pockets. Jacket again.

“Where’s my key?” he said.

Nobody said anything.

“My key. The truck key. It was right here.” He was patting his jacket pocket over and over, as if it might appear. “It’s one of those push-button fobs. I put it in this pocket. It was right here.”

“Do you have a spare?” his son-in-law asked.

Randall’s face went red. “The spare is in the kitchen drawer at home. In Springfield.”

“Okay,” said my niece. “We’ll just take my car.”

“Your car holds five,” Randall said. “There are fourteen of us. And the cabin keys are on that ring. And Joanne’s purse is locked in the truck, and so is her birthday cake, and so is the cooler with dinner.”

It was getting dark fast. The way it does down on that lake in October, all at once, like somebody pulling down a shade. It was getting cold, too. The littlest grandkids were already whining that they were hungry. There was no phone signal. We were ten minutes from the cabin by car and an hour and a half from home, and the only key to the only vehicle that could get most of us anywhere was somewhere on three miles of trail covered in fallen leaves.

Randall turned around and started back up the trail with his phone flashlight, scanning the ground. His son-in-law went with him. The rest of us stood in the gravel lot in the dusk, shivering.

Nobody knew what to do. My niece tried walking up the dirt road to see if she could get one bar of signal. She came back shaking her head. Somebody suggested breaking a truck window, and Randall looked like he might actually cry, because even with a broken window, the truck would not start without that fob. Joanne sat on a log at the edge of the lot with her arms around two of the little ones, trying to keep them warm, and she did not say one word about her birthday. That was the worst part. Seventy years old, and she was sitting in the cold in the dark, comforting everybody else.

Randall paced. Back and forth, back and forth across the gravel, patting his pockets again every few steps as if the key might have crawled back in on its own.

“This is my fault,” he kept saying. “This is my fault.”

Nobody argued with him.

They came back twenty-five minutes later. Randall was sweating and gray-faced. “It’s hopeless,” he said. “It’s all leaves. It’s black up there. It could be anywhere.”

And that’s when my nine-year-old great-nephew Toby, who had been to my house a dozen times, said it.

“Aunt Ruthie,” he said. “Pickles finds things.”

Find It

Everybody turned and looked at my dog.

Pickles was sitting at my feet in the gravel with his head tilted all the way to one side, looking up at Randall, as if he’d been waiting for somebody to ask.

Randall looked at the dog. Then he looked at me.

“You’re joking,” he said.

“Give me your jacket,” I said.

“What?”

“Your jacket, Randall. The pocket the key was in. Give it to me.”

He hesitated for a long moment. Then he took off his jacket and handed it over.

I knelt down in the gravel. I held the open pocket of Randall’s jacket up to Pickles’s nose. He snuffled into it for a good long while, the way he does with the grandkids’ socks, his beard twitching.

“Pickles,” I said. “Find it.”

He put his nose down and he went.

Not up the trail, at first. He zigzagged across the gravel lot to Randall’s truck and sniffed all around the driver’s door, and then he cut back and forth across the trailhead, and then he put his nose to the ground and took off up the trail into the dark, his little back half wagging, and I took off after him with my phone flashlight bouncing, and behind me I heard Randall say, “Oh, for God’s sake,” and then I heard him running too.

It’s a strange thing, following a dog in the dark. You stop thinking. You just watch the little white tip of his tail in the flashlight beam and you go where it goes. He stayed right on the trail for the first half mile or so, nose down, never stopping. Then, about a quarter mile below the overlook, at a bend where a big flat rock sticks out over the path, he stopped. He went off the trail to the left, down a little slope into the leaves. He snuffled around a fallen log. He dug once with his front paws.

And he came trotting back up onto the path toward me with something black in his mouth.

He sat down at my feet. And he held it up to me, very gently, the way he holds my reading glasses.

A black plastic key fob, on a ring with three keys and a little silver tag.

I heard Randall stop behind me on the trail, breathing hard.

“That’s where I stopped to tie my shoe,” he said quietly. “On the way up. I sat on that rock.”

I took the keys out of Pickles’s mouth and I held them out to my brother-in-law.

He didn’t take them right away. He just stood there in the dark, looking down at my scruffy little dog.

What Randall Said on the Way Down

We walked back down together. Randall carried the keys in his fist. He didn’t say anything for a long time, and I didn’t either.

Then, about halfway down, he said, “I had a dog when I was a boy.”

I looked at him. In forty-four years, I had never once heard Randall Pike talk about being a boy.

“A little mutt. Kind of like that one. Brown and scruffy. Followed me home from school one day when I was eight. I named him Scout. My dad hated him. Said he was useless, said a dog that didn’t hunt or guard was just a mouth to feed. I had him for a year and a half.” He was quiet for a few steps. “One day I came home from school and Scout was gone. Dad had driven him out to a farm in Polk County and left him there. Said I’d thank him someday. I never even got to say goodbye.”

I didn’t know what to say. I just kept walking beside him.

“I guess,” Randall said, “every time I see a dog like yours, I hear my dad. I hear him saying useless. And I say it before anybody can say it to me.” He laughed, but it wasn’t really a laugh. “That’s a stupid thing for a sixty-nine-year-old man to admit.”

“It’s not stupid,” I said.

When we came out of the trees into the gravel lot, all twelve of them were standing there in the dark, waiting. Randall held up the keys. And my family, all fourteen of us, cheered so loud I’m sure they heard it across the lake.

Joanne was crying. She grabbed Pickles up off the ground, beard and burrs and muddy paws and all, and kissed him on top of the head, and he let her, which tells you something.

The Toast

That night on the deck, after dinner, Randall stood up to give his speech for Joanne’s seventieth birthday. He had note cards. He’d been practicing for a week.

He looked at the note cards. Then he put them in his pocket.

“I had a whole speech,” he said. “About forty-four years. About how lucky I am. And all that’s true. But tonight I learned something, and I’d like to say it before I lose my nerve.”

He looked at me. Then he looked down at Pickles, who was lying under my chair, chewing on a rawhide the grandkids had found in a drawer.

“I’ve been calling that dog useless for six years,” Randall said. “I’ve called him a rat. I’ve called him a mop. I told everybody he was the dog nobody wanted. And tonight, when I was standing in the dark with no way to get my wife home on her birthday, the only one in this family who knew exactly what to do was that dog.”

He picked up his glass.

“So here’s to Joanne. The love of my life, who’s always been smarter than me. And here’s to Pickles.” He paused. “Who it turns out is smarter than me too.”

Everybody laughed. And then Randall did something I’ll never forget. He got down on one knee on that cabin deck, slowly, because his knees are as bad as mine, and he held out his big hand under my chair.

Pickles looked at it for a long moment. He tilted his head all the way over.

Then he crawled out, sniffed Randall’s fingers, and laid his bearded chin in his palm.

Since Then

Randall came by my house the week after we got home. I opened the door and he was standing on my porch holding a paper bag from the butcher on Glenstone.

“It’s a steak,” he said. “For the dog. Don’t give it to him all at once.”

Now, every Sunday dinner at Joanne’s, there’s a place for Pickles by Randall’s chair. Randall slips him things off his plate when he thinks Joanne isn’t looking. Joanne is always looking.

And last month, at my grandson’s birthday party, I heard a man from Randall’s office ask him, “Whose ugly dog is that?”

Randall set his beer down.

“That,” he said, “is the best dog in Greene County. And he’s family.”

If someone in your life has been called useless by people who never bothered to look closer, share this. Sometimes the scruffiest one in the room is the one who knows the way home.

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