Black Ribbon (15 page)

The sun had burned off the haze of the early morning. A few white cumulus clouds lingered. Miles up, the air must have been motionless. Just above the asphalt parking lot, it shimmered. Except around the obedience tent, the big field on the opposite side of the blacktop was empty. The breed handling class must have been taking place somewhere else, some place shady. I was sorry to miss it. Also in progress, if I remembered correctly, were doggy swimming lessons or maybe water rescue. Advanced agility would start soon. Jump chutes—chute jumping? Whatever it was called, it sounded like fun. If I could locate it, I’d cool Rowdy down, drench him if I had to, and let him give it a try.

Not for anything, though, would I skip obedience, which is my home within the home of dog fancy and the most comfortingly ritualist of the orders that make up what anthropologists would call a ritual brotherhood but what is, in fact, a sisterhood open to men. A true secret society, we really do have hidden mysteries, not because we try to hide our knowledge, though, but because our craft is damned hard to learn.
Anyway, what’s exceptional about us is that whereas almost all other secret societies, from socially valued brotherhoods to notorious criminal bands, from Freemasonry to the Cosa Nostra, are open only to men, our membership consists mainly of women. Also, on a less academic and more practical—not to mention romantic—note, let me add that, far from trying to exclude men, we actively welcome them. For one thing, it’s a lot of work lugging around those heavy mats and jumps, and the excess of muscular bulk that results from a lifetime of testosterone poisoning comes in very handy. For another, just as we enjoy having the monotony of all those high-scoring golden retrievers, Border collies, shelties, and poodles relieved by the occasional bloodhound, bullmastiff, Pharaoh hound, or even, God forbid, Alaskan malamute, so too are we delighted to welcome the least traditional of the nontraditional obedience breeds, the human male.

Indeed, to encourage men to participate in our sport, we’ve even instituted what amounts to an affirmative action program, and in case you think that we lower our rigorous standards in electing men to club offices, making them judges, and hiring them as head trainers, let me point to such gifted males as the late Milo Pearsall, not to mention Bob Self, Bernie Brown, Bob Adams, and the Worshipful Master of our camp obedience lodge, Chuck Siegel, an immensely tall blond guy of forty or so who was standing in the shade of the obedience tent instructing a group of eight women and one man, Michael, in one of the hidden mysteries of our order, namely, the art of spitting food.

I dumped my gear in an out-of-the-way spot at the edge of the tent, opened the canvas travel bag, got out Rowdy’s plastic travel bowl and a plastic bottle of water, and let him have a big drink. As he slurped, I filled my pockets with little cubes of cheddar that I’d brought to camp and carried that morning next to a plastic-encased ice substitute that was still cool from its sojourn in my freezer at home. In addition to Rowdy’s
good wooden dumbbell from Paul’s, the bag held his nonrec-yclable white nylon dumbbell, his flex lead with its plastic handle, and a generous supply of plastic clean-up bags, cheap clear ones for when no one was looking, expensive opaque white for public use. The world of obedience is such an ecological disaster area that I was surprised to see in the canvas bag one item made of a readily compostable substance, paper, glossy paper bright with the colors of hate-the-planet dyes, I suppose, but paper nonetheless. It proved to be a clipping from
Dog’s Life
, an item from what I recognized as our answer to
DOGworld’s
“Science and the Dog” and the
Gazette’s
“Veterinary News.” On one side of the clipping was a report about the near impossibility of accurately diagnosing Lyme disease; on the other, yet another warning about the hazards on giving human medications like acetaminophen to dogs. I read and even write those warnings all the time; they didn’t really worry me. I merely wondered what the clipping was doing in Rowdy’s bag.

Popping a bit of cheddar in my mouth, I summoned Rowdy to my left side, joined Chuck’s group, and spent a happy fifteen minutes or so perfecting my aim and Rowdy’s attention. The first time I ever saw a handler spit food from her mouth to her dog’s, I was totally disgusted. Before that, I’d always imagined that I’d do absolutely anything to get good scores. But
spit? Spit in public?
Well, I felt suddenly liberated, relaxed, relieved to have discovered that there was, after all, a limit to what I’d do to keep a few of those precious 200 points with which every dog-handler team walks into the obedience ring. Shortly thereafter, I happened to be at ringside when that same handler and her standard poodle scored a 199 in Open B, and lost that one point only because the judge lacked the self-confidence to give a 200. As Chuck Siegel told us,
“You
show me some other way to get a dog’s eyes glued on my face and not on my hands and not my pockets, and I’ll give it a try, but until we get some kind of technological breakthrough,
spitting’s the best we got, so we gotta learn to live with it.” Hear, hear!

Then Chuck announced that he was going to work with people who were just getting started in Open, people who were introducing their dogs to the dumbbell and the jumps. He suggested that the rest of us either practice on our own or move to the opposite end of the tent, where a tiny little bright-faced woman named Irma was doing what was billed as a show-and-go, but turned out to be run-throughs, in other words, a very informal, for-practice-only version of a trial. Irma had score sheets fastened to her clipboard, but unless a handler specifically requested a score, she just made comments and suggestions. Seated on a bench eyeing the run-throughs were Cam and Ginny. Nicky sat alertly at Cam’s feet. Wiz had half climbed into Ginny’s lap. Rowdy and I settled on the grass at the side of the bench. On the far side of the ring, Phyllis Abbott and three or four other people exchanged discontented-looking whispers. In the ring, a young woman called to her high-strung golden retriever. The dog dashed toward the handler and went directly to heel position. After Irma had uttered a few tactful words about the hazards of pattern training, Michael and pretty Jacob ran through the Novice routine.

“Anyone else for Novice?” Irma called out.

“What is this ‘Novice’?” Cam murmured. “This is supposed to be advanced, okay?”

Advanced: Open and Utility. Cam was right. I stood up anyway. “Sure,” I said. With Rowdy, the level makes almost no difference; the problem is getting him to behave at all. Recognizing the run-through for what it was, he didn’t do too badly. He crabbed out a little, and his sits could have been straighter, but when I said, “Heel,” he didn’t gaze into space and pretend that he’d never heard the word before; and on the Recall, he acted as if he’d never once in his life contemplated the possibility of charging in at ninety miles an hour, hitting
me full on, and knocking the wind out of me. Rowdy treats his creativity like money in the bank. Instead of squandering it on run-throughs and matches, he lets it sit there collecting interest. At the moment, he was saving up for a splurge at our national specialty, where we’d be up against Anna Morelli and Tundra, in whose presence, I felt certain, he intended to blow the whole fortune at once.

“Good attention,” Cam commented.

“Thank you,” I said. “He crabs out.” Translation: Instead of trotting along parallel to me, he heels with his front in close and his hindquarters out.

“Yeah, he does,” Cam agreed.

If you don’t show your dogs, you might imagine that my feelings were hurt, but except among the very top handlers, and not all of them—Cam, for example—obedience isn’t like that, and, especially among owner-handlers, neither is conformation.

I said, “I thought that was the kind of thing Chuck was going to work on.”

“It was,” Ginny said, “but there weren’t enough people or whatever, and so Maxine combined all the show obedience, and he’s stuck trying to do everything.”

“She did that a long time ago,” Cam said. “That’s what someone told me. Last winter or spring or something, when Lynette Watson was all set to come and do beginners’ and Novice, she got a letter from Maxine saying that, gee, she didn’t need her after all, and all about how sorry Max was. And Lynette wrote back and said it was far enough in advance, no problem. Only nobody bothered to tell us.”

“Lynette’s name was in that stuff that got sent to us.” Ginny sniffed. “Not that it matters to me.”

“Not that it does to me, either,” Cam said. “But what about Lynette? She could’ve made a stink if she’d felt like it. She lets people take advantage of her.”

“Maybe Maxine didn’t have much choice,” Ginny said.
“Maybe she just wasn’t getting as many people as she expected, or there weren’t all that many obedience people, and—”

“Which, since you mention it—” Cam said.

“There aren’t,” I finished. “There aren’t all that many of us.”

“Open?” Irma called. “Anyone for Open? And could I have some help setting up the jumps?”

Dog obedience shares with other human groups the universal internal distinction between those who pitch in and those who don’t. Phyllis Abbott and her buddies continued to talk among themselves while Cam, Ginny, Michael, and I carried out the broad jump hurdles and the high jump. As I was struggling to assemble the high jump, I overheard Phyllis saying, “What a mean thing to do! Losing a dog to bloat is bad enough, but this is utterly inexcusable!”

Bloat: gastric dilatation and volvulus syndrome, killer of dogs, especially of big breeds.

I glanced over to make sure that Rowdy hadn’t budged from his down-stay. “Is there a dog here with bloat?” I asked. The condition isn’t contagious. To scare me, it doesn’t have to be. The word alone makes my own stomach swell and twist.

“No,” Phyllis fumed. “Some stupid person has been leaving
printed material
all over camp. And among other things, this individual left an article on bloat in Jennifer’s handbag.” Phyllis swept a hand toward a sleek, fit, brown-haired woman with an equally sleek, fit Doberman bitch. “And we have been discussing what to do about the problem.” Lowering her voice to a level perfectly audible to the Dobermanlike Jennifer, Phyllis added, “Jennifer lost her Samson last spring.”

“Bloat,” I guessed.

Phyllis nodded.

“I’m very sorry,” I said.

“Thank you,” said Jennifer. “Whoever this is didn’t necessarily mean it personally. It was probably just an accident.”

Phyllis pulled herself even more upright than usual. “An accident? Purely by accident, someone is depositing clippings on pet theft and rabies and heartworm and unsafe dog toys? Purely by accident, everywhere we look, we find advertisements for pet loss counseling and brochures on the hazards of shipping our dogs by air? Well, if that’s what you think, Jennifer, then you and I have
very
different ideas of what constitutes an accident!”

“No, not that,” Jennifer protested. “I just meant that it was an accident that I got that one, the one on bloat. That it was just a coincidence. That it wasn’t meant for me
personally.”

“Well, it doesn’t matter one way or the other,” Phyllis said.

“We’re trying to decide what to do,” Jennifer informed me. “We think maybe the best thing is just to ignore it.”

“Somebody’s just doing it for attention,” another woman said.

“Eva Spitteler,” someone murmured.

Jennifer nodded. “Trying to feel important. When you think about it, it’s stupid. I mean, it’s mostly just stuff from the dog magazines. We read it all the time, anyway. And there’s no way I’m going to be more scared of bloat than I already am.”

I said, “It’s like that stuff that was left in the lodge last night, all those brochures for gravestones and things. It’s depressing, and nobody wants to think about it, but that’s pretty much it. And the sympathy cards. The point is, I guess, to get us worried. But Jennifer’s right. We’re the people who
do
take precautions. So we’re the people who ought to be least scared.”

“You’re missing the point,” Phyllis said. “The point is that we’re the perfect targets for this kind of campaign. The reason we take precautions is that we know these threats exist and we know our dogs are vulnerable and we’ll do anything to protect them. Is Mr. Pet Owner on the Street worried about kennel cough? Of course not. Mr. Pet Owner doesn’t even
know it exists, or if he does, and if he’s had his dog immunized, he thinks that means his dog’s one-hundred-percent protected. Believe me, this is not a campaign to frighten the pet people. It’s a campaign directed against
us.”

“It’s just Eva,” someone said. “Glutton for attention. Jealous of everyone else.”

“Well, I for one intend to ignore it,” Jennifer said.

The other woman nodded. I did, too. I disagreed with almost everything Phyllis had said. Although pet people probably weren’t as informed as we were, I thought that they loved their dogs as much as we did and tried as hard as we did to protect them; and I saw no evidence of a scare campaign targeted at show and obedience people. Whether Eva or someone else was responsible for the brochures, cards, and clippings, I agreed with the policy of doing nothing. “Whoever’s doing this,” I said, “wants to make trouble. The best thing to do is not let that happen. Just like training dogs. You make the result interesting, the behavior’s going to increase; you make the result boring, the behavior’s going to stop.”

“It’s only serious if we take it seriously,” someone said. “We have fun, it’s going to stop.”

And we did have fun, or at least I did. Watching top handlers work their dogs is always interesting. I returned to Rowdy, released him, and settled down on the grass to watch Cam, Jennifer, and a couple of other people who had a lot to teach me. Cam and Ginny continued to grumble about not getting what they’d paid for, but I felt satisfied to loll in the shade and stroke Rowdy’s head while I studied the beautiful handling of the real pros and the almost incredible precision of their wonderful dogs. Top handlers and their dogs move with the control and grace of dancers. Cam and Nicky, in particular, were the Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire of dog obedience. I wished that Cam were the instructor and that we were taking a course on footwork. On the left turn, you almost never actually see a dog remain in perfect heel position,
body parallel to the handler’s, every single second. As I watched Nicky, I briefly wished for a sheltie and even thought about asking Cam whether she intended to breed him. On reflection, I realized that if I moved like Cam, I’d give Rowdy at least half a chance to move like Nicky. And if Rowdy had observed the dogs as intently as I observed the handlers, he’d have felt humbled, too. Malamutes jump on power, and Rowdy jumped very well indeed, but when Jennifer’s Doberman, Delilah, took her jumps, I caught my breath, cursed to myself, shook my head, and grinned.