Shotgun
The Adventures of Gunner the Lab… Oh, and Tiger Too
Story 39: Shotgun
A Virginia Homestead Story — Present Day
The paper was still warm from the printer when the oldest walked out of the DMV.
A learner’s permit. His name on it. A photo where he wasn’t quite smiling but wasn’t quite not smiling either — the careful, steady expression of a kid who’d been waiting for this exact piece of paper for approximately his entire life.
Dad stood in the parking lot holding the keys to the truck. He looked at the keys. He looked at his oldest. He looked at the keys again.
And somewhere deep in his exhausted, cloud-architect, three-boys-and-a-homestead, never-slept-a-full-night-since-2010 soul, a single beautiful thought formed:
I never have to drive again.
He could feel the tears coming. He blinked them back. He was a grown man in a feed store parking lot.
“Here you go, bud,” Dad said, tossing the keys. “You’re driving home.”
The oldest caught them one-handed, because of course he did. He always caught everything one-handed. Dad climbed into the passenger seat for the first time in nine years and let out a breath that felt like it had been waiting since the boys were born.
He closed his eyes.
He was going to nap. Oh, he was going to nap.
That’s when the back door opened and ninety pounds of black Labrador climbed in, climbed over the center console, and planted himself directly in Dad’s lap.
“Gunner. Gunner. Back seat, buddy.”
Gunner’s tail thumped against the dashboard. His face was approximately three inches from Dad’s face. His breath smelled like the salmon treats Mom had given him that morning, and also, somehow, like dirt.
Dad wrestled him into the back seat. Gunner climbed back into the front. Dad put him in the back. Gunner came back to the front. This happened four times in the parking lot of the DMV while the oldest sat patiently in the driver’s seat, hands at ten and two, waiting for the chaos in the passenger seat to resolve itself.
A woman walking by laughed out loud.
“Gunner, the seat is for me now,” Dad said, in the patient, reasonable voice of a man who had not yet accepted his fate.
Gunner stared at him. Gunner had been the shotgun dog for nine years. Across three states. Through every move, every feed store run, every trip to the vet, every drive-thru where someone occasionally — accidentally, definitely accidentally — handed back a French fry. Shotgun was his birthright. Shotgun was his identity.
Dad was new here, apparently.
By the time they pulled out of the parking lot, a compromise had been reached: Gunner sat in the back seat behind the oldest, with his head wedged firmly between the two front seats so that his entire face was approximately four inches from Dad’s right ear.
Dad closed his eyes anyway. He was committed. The nap would happen.
The oldest drove like a kid who had spent ten years watching his parents drive and was going to do every single thing right on principle. Mirrors. Blinker. Hands at ten and two. Speed limit exactly. Two-second following distance. He took the mountain curves with the careful concentration of a surgeon.
Dad’s eyes drifted shut. The hum of the tires. The sun on his face. Years and years of accumulated exhaustion preparing to release in one glorious—
A wet nose pressed against his ear.
“Gunner.”
The wet nose retreated. Dad closed his eyes again. The hum of the tires. The sun. The—
Gunner sighed directly into his ear canal. A long, warm, salmon-scented sigh. The kind of sigh that says I love you and I am here and you should also know I am breathing on you forever.
“Gunner.”
The oldest, eyes locked on the road, said calmly, “He’s checking on you, Dad.”
“He’s suffocating me, son.”
“That’s how he checks.”
They made it about six miles down the mountain before Gunner committed his masterpiece.
Dad had finally — finally — drifted into something resembling actual sleep. His head had tipped back against the headrest. His mouth was slightly open. The exhaustion of nine years was draining out of him in real time.
Gunner watched this happen from his post between the seats. He observed. He processed. And in his big, dumb, deeply loving brain, a single thought formed:
Dad is sad and lonely up there all by himself.
Gunner solved this problem the way Gunner solved every problem: by physically inserting himself into it.
Ninety pounds of black Lab flowed — there is no other word for it, flowed — over the center console and into Dad’s lap. Front paws on the passenger window. Back paws on Dad’s thighs. Tail directly in Dad’s face. The entire weight of a full-grown Labrador suddenly distributed across one sleeping cloud architect.
Dad made a sound that was not quite a word.
The oldest, white-knuckling the steering wheel, said, “DAD. I CAN’T SEE.”
“I—” Dad couldn’t finish the sentence. There was a tail in his mouth.
“Dad, the mirror. Gunner is in the mirror.”
“GUNNER. DOWN.”
Gunner, hearing his name and the tone of joyful celebration he had clearly inspired, wagged harder. The tail thwapped Dad’s face in steady, rhythmic, loving slaps.
The oldest pulled over onto the shoulder with the careful precision of a kid who had absolutely, positively, one hundred percent been told what to do in an emergency and was doing it. He put the truck in park. He turned on the hazards. He looked at his father — buried under a Labrador, hair sticking up, one eye visible — and said, with the calm authority of a man twice his age:
“Dad. He needs to be in the back.”
“I know he needs to be in the back.”
“I’m just saying. For safety.”
“I know.”
From the driver’s seat, the oldest watched his father wrestle a ninety-pound Lab off his lap and into the back seat for the fifth time that day. He didn’t laugh. He didn’t even smile. He just waited, hands at ten and two, until the situation was resolved, then signaled, checked his mirrors, and pulled carefully back onto the road.
Dad stared out the window. He had not napped. He was not going to nap. He could feel this in his bones now.
The next trip, Tiger got involved.
Tiger had never — never — willingly gotten into the truck. Tiger considered the truck an indignity, a moving box, a thing that smelled like dog and produced unpleasant motion. In nine years and three states, Tiger had been in a vehicle exactly when forced into one and had complained the entire time.
So when Dad opened the back door of the truck to put Gunner in for the trip to the feed store, and Tiger came strolling across the porch, down the steps, across the gravel, and hopped into the back seat of his own free will, Dad stopped what he was doing and stared.
“…Tiger?”
Tiger settled himself on the bench seat, tucked his paws under his chest, and looked at Dad with the calm, satisfied expression of a creature who had cleared his entire schedule for what was about to happen.
“Mom!” Dad called toward the house. “Mom, Tiger got in the truck.”
Mom appeared in the doorway, holding a cup of coffee. She looked at Tiger. She looked at Dad. She looked at the oldest, who was already in the driver’s seat, ready to go.
“Oh,” Mom said slowly, the corner of her mouth twitching. “Oh, he’s coming to watch.”
“Watch what?”
Mom took a long, slow sip of her coffee. She did not answer. She just looked at Dad with the expression of a woman who had been married long enough to know exactly what was about to happen and was choosing to enjoy it from a distance.
They were four miles down the mountain when Dad understood.
Tiger had positioned himself in the back seat behind the passenger side, where he had a perfect, unobstructed view of the front. He sat upright. Tail wrapped around his paws. Golden eyes fixed forward. He looked like a tiny striped audience member at the world’s most exclusive theater.
Gunner was in the back seat behind the driver, doing the head-between-the-seats thing again, breathing into Dad’s ear.
Dad closed his eyes.
He’d barely gotten to the part of the nap where the body starts to feel heavy when Gunner began the slow, inevitable migration over the center console. Dad felt the weight shift. He felt the first paw land on his thigh. He opened one eye.
And there, in the back seat, was Tiger — Tiger, who had not voluntarily entered a vehicle in nine years — watching. Eyes locked on the unfolding chaos. Whiskers forward. The smallest, most satisfied expression on his striped face. The expression of a producer whose show was going exactly as planned.
Dad had a sudden, awful, certain realization:
Tiger had organized this.
Tiger had been waiting for this.
Tiger had spent nine years in the warm strategic silence of his small striped brain, watching the dog get the front seat, watching Dad pretend to be in charge, watching the boys grow up — and the moment the oldest got that learner’s permit, Tiger had calculated, correctly, that the funniest possible outcome of this development was going to be Dad trying to nap while a ninety-pound Lab refused to allow it.
And Tiger had cleared his schedule. Tiger had bought a ticket.
Gunner finished his migration. Ninety pounds of Lab settled into Dad’s lap like a weighted blanket made of regret. The tail began its rhythmic face-slap. The oldest sighed and signaled and pulled over for the second time that week.
In the back seat, Tiger blinked once, slowly, in pure feline contentment.
By the third week, Dad had stopped fighting it.
He’d developed a system. Gunner sat in the front seat — Dad’s old seat — head out the window, jowls flapping, ears like flags. Dad sat in the back. Tiger sat next to Dad, because apparently this was their arrangement now and Dad did not have the energy to question it. The oldest drove. The oldest always drove. The oldest was, frankly, a better driver than Dad had ever been.
Dad would lean his head against the back-seat window. The mountain road would unspool past. The oldest would hum quietly to himself the way he did when he was concentrating. Gunner’s tail would wag against the gear shift. Tiger would settle against Dad’s thigh, somehow not pretending to hate it for once.
And Dad would close his eyes.
And — finally, finally — he would nap.
It turned out the nap had never been about the front seat. The nap had been about not being the one in charge for fifteen minutes. The nap had been about a kid old enough to drive and a dog old enough to know exactly where he belonged and a cat old enough to have engineered the entire situation for his own personal entertainment.
The nap had been waiting for all of them to grow into it.
They pulled into the feed store parking lot. The oldest parked perfectly — straight lines, even spacing, the kind of parking job that would’ve made any driving instructor weep with joy.
He turned around in the driver’s seat.
His dad was asleep in the back. Mouth slightly open. Glasses crooked. Tiger pressed against his leg, also asleep, paws tucked. Gunner was still up front, head out the window, watching a squirrel with the focused devotion of a dog who had found his life’s purpose.
The oldest didn’t wake them up. He sat there for a minute, hands resting on the steering wheel, looking at his sleeping father and his sleeping cat and his ridiculous dog and the feed store parking lot in the southwestern Virginia mountains.
Then he turned the truck off, real quiet, and got out, and went into the feed store by himself. He knew what to buy. He’d been listening for ten years.
When he came back out twenty minutes later with a fifty-pound bag of chicken feed over his shoulder, Dad was still asleep. Tiger was still asleep. Gunner had switched windows.
The oldest loaded the feed into the truck bed, climbed back into the driver’s seat, signaled out of the parking lot even though there was nobody for half a mile, and drove his family home.
Dad slept the whole way.
It was the best nap he’d had in nine years.