We raised two dogs from pup­pies, an Amer­i­can Bull­dog and a Keeshond. Just past their four­teenth birth­days, they each got can­cer. We tried every­thing, even chemother­a­py. In the end they were weak and in con­stant pain, so I held them in my arms while the vet euth­a­nized them. My wife and I cried for weeks. I dream about them still. In a recur­ring dream, Goose and Copey are run­ning up a gen­tle slop­ing wheat field. I’m at its base. When they reach the crest, they turn and look back. I call to them to wait for me. They wag their tails, their mouths open in pant­i­ng dog-grins, and they turn and trot over the hill out of sight. I wake up cry­ing every time, and I cried again writ­ing about it here.

When they died, I vowed I would nev­er own anoth­er dog. It hurt too much. I held out for two years. Then I fell in love with Zoey, an Amer­i­can Bull­dog, who had been aban­doned, and we took her in. Cou­ple years after that, we adopt­ed a five month old aban­doned Pit Bull with severe­ly cropped ears. The vet told us his own­ers cut them off with a pair of scis­sors so they could fight him. Those peo­ple are lucky we don’t know who they are.

P.D. is the Pit Bull’s name. The let­ters stand for noth­ing. They just seemed to fit. Zoey and P.D. think I’m the leader of their pack, sort of a Big Dog, but P.D. is par­tial to pret­ty girls and great­ly favors my wife. I think it’s because she’s for­ev­er slip­ping him slices of grilled chick­en. She thinks it’s because he’s a good judge of char­ac­ter. Zoey is my dog. She loves me above all oth­er liv­ing beings because she’s much the bet­ter judge of char­ac­ter. Our trips to Star­bucks every morn­ing, where I split a piece of lemon pound cake with her, have noth­ing to do with it.

I write in my office at a desk that sits between two dog beds. Zoey takes the one on the right (it’s the one clos­est to me) and P.D. deigns to loll around on the one on the left when he can’t find Big Dog’s Wife.

If it wasn’t for the dogs, I’d weigh 300 pounds. I’d sit here writ­ing all day with ever expand­ing lay­ers of fat metas­ta­siz­ing to fill the broad well of my desk chair. But the dogs won’t have it. Every hour or two Zoey lays her head on my thigh; her ador­ing brown eyes look up at me; and she whines. What­ev­er bril­liant art­ful pas­sage I’m work­ing on melts out of my head, and we go out for a walk or play­time. Both dogs are eighty pounds of mus­cle. Their idea of a walk is to run like the wind, while I hang on to their leash­es like one of those guys in an old west­ern movie, who gets tied to a horse and dragged on his bel­ly through a field of cac­tus. Play­time is eas­i­er. I throw a ball or a chew toy. They fetch it, streak back to me, knock me down, and do a wild vic­to­ry dance on my prone car­cass. These work­outs are good for my health, I sup­pose, because I don’t have much of a weight prob­lem, although the occa­sion­al life-threat­en­ing injury can be inconvenient.

If it’s not already obvi­ous, let me be clear that I sol­id-down love the dogs. Which is why an arti­cle enti­tled Dogs, Strangers and God by Den­nis Prager, the radio talk show host, caught my eye. Since the 1970’s, he has asked col­lege stu­dents who they would try to save first if a stranger and their dog are  drown­ing togeth­er. He’s got­ten the same result for forty years: one third would save the stranger, one third the dog, and one third don’t know what the hell to do.

So I took the test. Zoey and some stranger are drown­ing. What would I do? I thought this through ratio­nal­ly. I don’t know any­thing about this drown­ing stranger. He could be a real­ly bad per­son, a pedophile, a ser­i­al killer, or some­one who post­ed a bad review about one of my books on Ama­zon. Not a close call. I choose Zoey over such despi­ca­ble scum.

But sup­pose the drown­ing per­son is some­one I know, an acquain­tance or a close friend? I am still unmoved. If it’s just an acquain­tance, I’m fish­ing out Zoey. I don’t know the per­son that well; where­as I love Zoey. It’s also crys­tal clear that sav­ing a close friend could end up being a mis­take. I mean do we real­ly know any­one deep down, no mat­ter how good a friend he may claim to be? How do I know my good friend isn’t secret­ly a bad per­son? How do I know this so-called friend real­ly even likes me? He could be fak­ing it to gain advan­tages from me, like being hauled out of a lake when he’s drown­ing. But I know beyond all doubt that Zoey is a Great Dog, who loves me. I’m pick­ing Zoey over this pho­ny pre­tender every time.

How about a rel­a­tive? …  Long pause … Which relative?

A rel­a­tive I love? My own child? My wife? .… Much longer pause.… You see, peo­ple, this is why you have got to teach your dog to swim. Put them in the pool and show them where the steps are. And don’t for­get rat­tlesnake avoid­ance train­ing and teach­ing them not to walk out into the road and make sure to get them all the shots on time and run them through a com­plete phys­i­cal every six months.… Sigh.…Okay, pressed to the wall, if my child or wife was the per­son drown­ing, I’d try to save them and Zoey togeth­er first, but if that failed, I wouldn’t let my kids or wife go down. Sor­ry, Zoey. Sob!

Den­nis Prager is astound­ed and trou­bled by the col­lege stu­dents who choose to save their dog and he would be even more appalled by my atti­tude. The moral choice is clear to him. You save the human being in all cas­es because man is cre­at­ed in God’s image and ani­mals are not. Feel­ings of love for the dog should give way to moral val­ues “divine­ly revealed” by God. I admire Den­nis and agree with him about many things, but on this one, I don’t see why he ignores God’s piv­otal role in caus­ing all the trou­ble. Who does he think dumped Zoey and all these peo­ple in the drink in the first place? I mean God’s in charge, after all. If He tries to drown my dog, He oughtn’t blame me for bail­ing her out.

But this, I know, is not the moral high ground. Den­nis lays that out here: http://www.dennisprager.com/dogs-strangers-and-god/

In essence, Den­nis’ posi­tion boils down to this: humans have a soul; dogs do not. I hope this is not true. When my brother’s dog, Oscar, died, he was dev­as­tat­ed. “If they don’t have dogs in heav­en,” he said, “I don’t want to go there.” If you com­bine my brother’s IQ with mine, and even if you throw in my oth­er brother’s IQ, my guess is we’d total out at about half Den­nis’ score, but I agree with my broth­er. I’ll con­fess I’m a lit­tle trou­bled about the con­se­quences of turn­ing down heav­en, con­sid­er­ing the alter­na­tive, but a dog­less one does not sound like a hap­py place to me. I hope Nicky, Pam, Brigid, Joey, Copey, Goose, and even­tu­al­ly Zoey and P.D., not to men­tion the eigh­teen cats we owned over the years, all make the cut and get into heav­en. It’s only fair. To para­phrase Mark Twain, if heav­en went by mer­it, you would stay out and your dog would go in. In the mean­time, I’m not tak­ing my dogs near any body of water more than a foot deep.

When your imag­i­na­tion first gives birth to a sto­ry, the char­ac­ters are name­less, and choos­ing names is an impor­tant step in flesh­ing out their iden­ti­ties. The names must fit the per­son­al­i­ties. Huck Finn stiff­ens up if you call him Jack­son Rem­ing­ton Pol­lack, III, and D’Artagnan of The Three Mus­ke­teers los­es all his steam if you name him Humphrey Clinker.

Nam­ing my death row inmate Ken­neth Deather­age (pro­nounced “death a ridge”) in The Clos­ing took me on a mean­der­ing jour­ney. The sur­name was easy. I found it research­ing the ances­try of the Oder fam­i­ly. My ances­tors were farm­ers liv­ing near Lit­tle Wash­ing­ton and Flint Hill, Vir­ginia, in the 1800’s. Deather­ages lived all around them, and I found grave­stones near those towns bear­ing that name dat­ing back to 1830. I was so famil­iar with the name when I select­ed it for my char­ac­ter that I didn’t real­ize until lat­er how well it matched the accu­sa­tions against him – Death rage.

His giv­en name was what caused me trou­ble. Orig­i­nal­ly, I called him Carl Deather­age, but that didn’t feel right after I’d writ­ten a few chap­ters. This often hap­pens. As a char­ac­ter devel­ops and matures, the name I first chose slides off the mark, and I’ll cast around for a bet­ter fit. Deather­age became Robert, then Logan, then Lon­ni­gan. None of them worked, and in the end I gave him my first name, Ken­neth, and I had his moth­er call him Ken­ny, which my mom called me till the day she passed on. At least one friend was trou­bled by this. “Why would you give an accused mur­der­er-rapist your own name?” she asked, look­ing some­what anx­ious. (I’ve also noticed she’s care­ful nev­er to be left alone with me since she read the book.) The rea­son is I had a hard time get­ting into this character’s head. I thought maybe giv­ing him my name would help me under­stand him bet­ter. My trick helped some. I even devel­oped some empa­thy for him, but it didn’t serve to over­come the dis­tance between us. It was an inter­est­ing exer­cise, though.

I take spe­cial care in my nov­els with sur­names. My sto­ries are set in Vir­ginia in the 60’s, so for authen­tic­i­ty, I search for long-time Vir­ginia fam­i­ly names. Ros­aline Part­low was my great great grand aunt. She lived near Lit­tle Wash­ing­ton in the 1860’s. The mur­der vic­tim, Dar­lene Updike, takes her name from anoth­er ances­tor from that same place and time. The name Feed­low (the Buck Coun­ty sher­iff in The Clos­ing) comes from a 1760 mar­riage record, but the name is prob­a­bly an error. In those days most peo­ple were illit­er­ate and couldn’t spell their names. The coun­ty clerks would do their best to spell them pho­net­i­cal­ly and they often got it wrong. To make mat­ters worse, the records are hand­writ­ten, fad­ed with age, and some­times inde­ci­pher­able.  Feed­low became Fid­dler and some­times Field­er in lat­er records, but I liked the sound of Feed­low, so I stayed with it.

Nate Abbitt’s fam­i­ly name came from attor­neys in Appo­mat­tox, who rep­re­sent­ed my father in his par­ents’ divorce pro­ceed­ings when he was a boy. There was no legal prece­dent in the ear­ly 30’s for a child hav­ing sep­a­rate rep­re­sen­ta­tion in those cas­es, but two young lawyers, the Abbitt broth­ers, took him on pro bono and blazed a new trail in the chancery court, resolv­ing cus­tody more in line with his wish­es. One of the broth­ers lat­er became the coun­ty commonwealth’s attor­ney, and although Nate’s char­ac­ter was in no way based on these lawyers, I bor­rowed their sur­name for Nate.

I named my myopic pri­vate inves­ti­ga­tor, Clarence Shif­flett. The name Clarence was per­fect for this eccen­tric old gumshoe, but I caught some flack from a read­er who thought I stole the name Shif­flett from a John Grisham char­ac­ter in The Rain­mak­er. I didn’t steal it. Grisham lives in Nel­son Coun­ty, Vir­ginia, near my old stomp­ing grounds. Shif­flett is a more com­mon name there than Smith or Jones. About half my child­hood friends were Shif­fletts and 450 of them swell the pages of the Char­lottesville phone book today. If I want­ed to make my books more real­is­tic with­out regard to the con­fu­sion it would cause, I’d name almost all my char­ac­ters Shif­flett. But let me tell you, it’s a tough name to spell cor­rect­ly when you address a Christ­mas card to a friend. There are so many vari­a­tions on the num­ber of t’s and f’s with a silent p occa­sion­al­ly dropped in the mid­dle or an e tacked on to the end. I can’t keep the dif­fer­ent ver­sions straight. Even with Clarence, a guy I made up, I unin­ten­tion­al­ly spelled the name four dif­fer­ent ways in the draft man­u­script. Near­ly drove my copy edi­tor crazy. A web­site about this inter­est­ing and sto­ried fam­i­ly can be found at http://www.klein-shiflett.com/shifletfamily/HHI/surname.html.

I gave one of my char­ac­ters in The Clos­ing a vari­a­tion of my own sur­name. The clerks in colo­nial Vir­ginia messed up my fam­i­ly name to the point where I don’t know what it real­ly was or where it came from. Peo­ple I can prove were of my blood­line are list­ed in old records as Oder, Odar, Odir, Ody­er, O’Dyer, Odo, Odoe, Oden, Odor, Odle, O’Der, Odom, Odoms, and on and on. So I named the African Amer­i­can man, who cap­tured Deather­age and held him down until the law arrived, Willis Odoms. He was the most admirable char­ac­ter in the book, so maybe I was try­ing to make it up to my moth­er and my anx­ious friend for hav­ing named my accused mur­der­er-rapist Kenny.

Any­way, my sur­name is a sore point with me, giv­en all the teas­ing it gen­er­at­ed when I was in ele­men­tary school (not to men­tion the con­tin­u­ing jabs from adults who nev­er pro­gressed beyond grade school matu­ri­ty lev­els). I often wish that some­one in my direct line had steered the spelling of the name toward a less odi­ous (get it?) out­come. So maybe I should change it, the way I change a fic­tion­al character’s name when I don’t like it. Costs about $150 to change a name legal­ly, I hear, well worth it in my case. With all the demo­graph­ic shifts in the coun­try, I fig­ure I’ll go with the flow and choose some­thing with a Latin flair to it. I’m think­ing Ken­i­to Aroma.