The old man saw her on the interstate. It was a dog, seated in the median of the busy highway. The old girl was frightened and unmoving.
The highway was screaming with traffic. On each side of the median were rivers of speeding headlamps. The road was too busy to cross. So the dog sat in the grass.
When the old man saw her, he flipped on his hazards. He eased to a stop on the shoulder and leapt into the tall weeds, bounding for her.
As the old man made his way through the grass, he was simultaneously removing his belt to use as a makeshift leash. Which caused his pants to fall down. Which revealed his bare backside to all eastbound motorists on I-10 that evening.
“I don’t wear underwear,” the old man told me during our interview. “Too constricting.”
When he reached the dog, she looked at him with pleading eyes. She was nervously panting.
“I spoke Spanish to her,” said the old man. “My mom was from Mexico City, she believed
that dogs listened to Spanish better than English. Dogs always listened to my mom.”
He looped the belt around the animal’s head then led her to his car. He noticed she was limping and whimpering.
“She was hurt worse than I’d thought,” he said. “She was bleeding all over my backseat.”
I’ll spare you the gory details and simply tell you that it was an ugly wound. A life-threatening one. She needed medical attention. And fast.
So our hero used his smartphone to search for emergency veterinary doctors.
The old man was on his way to Texas that night to visit his daughters. He was a foreigner in a foreign land. And he must have been quite a sight, too.
A confused old man, standing on the shoulder, in the middle of the night, looking at his phone, with a portion of his bare white…