Woman Gets Between Man, His Best Friend
A pickup. A woman. A yeller dog.
Add three chords and a twangy guitar and you can turn George Carter’s troubles into one of those maudlin, sobbing-in-your-Budweiser country tunes.
Suggested title: “You May Muzzle My Pride, Babe, But Take Your Paws Off My Mutt.”
For almost a year, the Spokane man has been walkin’ the floor over Junior, his missing golden retriever, and the woman he says done him wrong.
Carter handed out 900 fliers in his search. He followed every lead. The man has Parkinson’s disease and doesn’t drive so all of the legwork really was legwork.
“For a while, I was walking 30 miles a day,” says Carter, 47. “I’ve had to cut down to 10.”
The other day he sent the newspaper a four-page account of his travails. It was so oozing with misery I had to meet him.
I could waste a month investigating every detail of Carter’s shaggy-dog saga, but that would destroy the poetry. Besides, who would make up something like this?
“My relatives think I’m nuts,” adds Carter of his obsession to be reunited with Junior. “But he’s been my best friend for eight years. I know he’s out there looking for me.”
The last time he set eyes on his beloved Junior was on a highway outside of Walla Walla back in September. Junior was sitting in Carter’s 1972 Chevy pickup with his traveling companion who was driving.
Until this mess gets sorted out, let’s call her Kate.
Carter says he met the woman in Nevada. They became friends and decided to strike out north together.
The man’s life has been in the dumper ever since he started getting sick about 10 years ago. He says he lost his business and was once nailed for possessing cocaine. His family broke apart.
Sick of the Nevada heat, he took off for a change in scenery with Kate in early September 1995.
Bad luck clung to Carter like a scab.
During a routine traffic stop, Carter says he was hauled off to the pokey when the officer checked his ID. The computer showed a bench warrant out of Snohomish County over an an old unpaid driving violation.
Kate vowed to rendezvous with Carter in Spokane once he settled up with the law. But 20 days later - when he finally hitchhiked to the Lilac City - her trail was colder than a 7-Eleven Slurpee.
Carter has been looking for Junior ever since. He collects Social Security every month and has worked as a volunteer at Spokane’s Union Gospel Mission.
His persistence has some rewards. He recently discovered his former travelmate had been living in the Garfield, Wash., area where she sold his truck and trailer.
“I wished to hell I’d never seen the damn thing,” says the Deer Park man who paid Kate nearly $500 for Carter’s travel trailer. He discovered the trailer was on the hot sheet when he tried to get a license.
Carter tracked down his pickup earlier this month. That was sold, he says, to a Marshall resident.
Whether he gets any material items back is really secondary. “This search has nothing to do with jealousy, revenge or greed,” he says. “I just want my dog!”
Junior is apparently one special mutt. Carter says he once trained the dog to run to the store and bring back a pack of cigarettes for a friend.
But where is he?
Kate’s Garfield neighbors told Carter she moved out of a rental and may have vamoosed to Michigan. Without Junior.
The dog, they say, ran away last December. So people of the Palouse be warned. If you encounter a golden retriever buying Marlboros at the Safeway, see if he answers to the name Junior.
A pickup. A woman. A yeller dog.
“When I left Nevada I just wanted to find a spot on the side of a mountain where Junior and I could take care of each other, bemoans Carter.
“If I could find my dog, I’d have him bite her.”
, DataTimes