Black Ribbon (17 page)

When the lead had broken, Michael must have been too startled to press the trigger on the handle. The loose length of cord had retracted all the way inside the case. The other end was still attached to Jacob, a short length of ordinary flat nylon lead securely snapped to his collar, then the thin, strong cord, the part meant to retract inside the case. I followed it to its end, held it, stared at it, and wished that I knew something—anything at all—about how to tell whether a rope has simply broken or whether it’s been deliberately cut. To my ignorant
eye, the cord showed no signs of wear. It certainly wasn’t frayed. Except at the end, where it had broken quite cleanly, it looked brand-new.

“Michael,” I said quietly, “are you sure that this is
your
lead?”

PROPPED ON AN EASEL at the entrance to the dining room was a cork bulletin board. It displayed a big, bright advertisement for the camp store, an amateurish but enthusiastic-looking reminder about Canine Good Citizen testing, and an unobtrusive announcement of the cancellation of two other events scheduled for the afternoon, something called “Terrier Fun,” and a workshop on spinning and weaving dog hair. I didn’t really mind missing either. For all I knew, Terrier Fun consisted of coaching bold little scrappers in new and yet more senseless ways to take on malamutes. As for spinning and weaving, Rowdy and Kimi undoubtedly had a greater aptitude for producing the raw material than I did for fashioning it into garments in which anyone might want to be seen. Also tacked to the board was a sheet of white paper that proclaimed in the emphatic red capitals of a felt-tipped pen: “UNSUPERVISED USE OF THE AGILITY AREA IS STRICTLY FORBIDDEN!”

As I started to enter the dining room, Maxine came up in back of me and demanded, “Didn’t you just
love
agility?”

Mindful of my instructions from Bonnie, Max’s dear friend, I compliantly said that indeed, Rowdy and I had both loved agility and that, if anything, he was having even more fun than I was. That latter part of my remark was perfectly true. The rawhide bone in the tunnel had been an outright treat. Neither the sympathy cards nor the casket and headstone ads nor the scary clippings about dangers and diseases nor Jacob’s broken lead had bothered Rowdy at all. He wouldn’t have liked having his own scent articles treated with Bitter Apple, but a nasty taste in another dog’s mouth was no concern of his.

“It’s so
marvelous,
” said Max, “to watch all my dreams becoming a reality.”

All my dreams becoming a reality?
Ever since Rita and I became friends, it has often occurred to me that the average nonpsychotherapeutic person—myself, for instance—lives in what sometimes feels like unremitting need of Rita’s professional advice. I seldom have trouble telling whether someone is cracking up; all too often, the break is disconcertingly obvious. What I never know is how I’m supposed to respond. Lacking professional training, I fall back on lies. “It must be wonderful,” I told Max. If I’d been Rita, and Max had walked into my office and said that camp was going great, I’d probably have made exactly the same reply.

As I was wondering whether any of the medications in Rowdy’s first-aid kit would do as a reality-sharpener for human beings, Eva Spitteler waddled up, planted herself in front of Max and me, and, feet spread, arms akimbo, began to tell Max almost everything I’d kept to myself. “I can take a joke with the best of them,” Eva began, “but some of the shit that’s going on around here is no joke. Take this.” She rummaged around in the pocket of her shorts and produced yet another of the sympathy cards, this one heavily dusted with the residue of dog treats. “It was shoved under my door, and I don’t like that one damn bit, and all the other shit about dog funerals
and bloat and all that other crap is goddamn depressing; and then on top of it, half of what was in your brochure has been canceled, or it’s just sort of disappeared between the time I sent you a fat check and the time I got here. Like tracking. Tracking’s not some kind of an
obscure
thing to do with a dog, and it’s in the brochure, and I show up here all ready to get Bingo started tracking, and I’ve got a tracking lead and tracking harness, and I look over the schedule, and well, well, big surprise! No tracking. And instead of advanced obedience, everyone’s lumped together, and the whole idea was that we get to try everything, and everyone’s giving me this shit about staying with what I started and
not
moving around; and every time I turn around, someone’s yelling at me about scooping up poop, and I have really
had
it! Because I did not pay all this money and drive all this way to spend a week sitting around and cleaning up dog shit!”

With that, Eva stomped through the French doors that led to the dining room.

“Her mother,” Maxine remarked placidly, “should’ve taken one look and culled that one.”

Cull.
In one sense, every breeder does it: separates out the puppies with obvious faults and problems. In another sense, an ethical breeder does it rarely: immediately destroys those pups, the culls. Any good breeder spares a hopelessly sick puppy the agony of incurable illness or pain, and any good breeder removes the culls from the gene pool. A few breeders still follow what used to be a rather common practice of euthanizing any puppy with a show fault: a malamute with a mismark, an Akita with a coat like Jacob’s. Neutered, as Jacob was, he obviously couldn’t pass along the undesirable trait to any offspring. What a dog like that could do, though, was to advertise the presence of the trait in his breeder’s line, announce to other breeders that so-and-so’s dogs produced long coats, and maybe make breeders reluctant to pay hefty stud
fees. I shrugged my shoulders, excused myself, and entered the dining room.

The unappetizing nature of my preprandial reflections was probably just as well because spread out on a long buffet table was what extensive experience in helping out at dog shows immediately led me to identify as the stewards’ lunch—cold cuts, Swiss cheese, thin slices of pale tomatoes, iceberg lettuce, mayonnaise, primary-yellow mustard, soft bread, and squishy rolls—as opposed to the officials’ lunch—chicken, say, or roast beef sandwiches—and certainly as opposed to the exalted feast of something like lobster salad or the plate of something hot and delicious that every judge has the right to expect. We, however—or
they
, the nonscholarship campers—had paid judges’ prices. I filled my plate. The stewards’ lunch was what I was used to, anyway. What really would have spoiled it would have been trying to swallow it in the presence of Eva Spitteler. I glanced around and saw her settling her wide bottom in a chair next to Eric Grimaldi’s at a table in the far corner of the dining room. Eric was sitting right in the corner, and Eva had every appearance of intending to keep him there. As I turned to look for a seat far away from Eva, Cam White appeared at my side. She murmured, “Wasting her time. Where are you sitting?”

“Nowhere,” I said. “I just got here.”

“There’s room at our table.” Jiggling her plate a little, Cam said, “This is seconds. Hardly worth it, but I’m hungry, and it’s what there is. Come and sit with us. You don’t want to …” She turned her head meaningfully in Eva’s direction.

“No, I don’t,” I agreed. Heeling at Cam’s left side, I asked, “What did you mean?”

“By what?”

“Wasting her time.”

“Oh, it’s just sort of a joke about Eric. He loves to judge, and he likes to swim, and he doesn’t mind working on his tan, either. He likes California, Florida, and he isn’t exactly above
putting up the worst-looking dog in the world if it just so happens that he puts up the dog, and lo and behold, whoever would have guessed, certainly not Eric, the owners turn out to be Mr. and Mrs. President and Show Chairman of the Surf and Sand Kennel Club, which just so happens to need a Sporting Group judge for the middle of January. I don’t know what Eva thinks she’s doing, but she doesn’t even belong to a club, and she’s never going to be in a position to get him any kind of assignment, never mind the kind he likes. So like I said, she’s wasting her time.”

Newcomer to the fancy? The obvious question: Why didn’t Judge Eric Grimaldi just write to offer his services to every kennel club in Florida and California? Easy. Masons are forbidden to recruit members; AKC judges, to solicit assignments. And while we’re on the subject, let me report that as Cam and I passed by the table where Don and Phyllis Abbott were seated, Phyllis Abbott caught sight of me and exclaimed, “I just have to tell you that I am so impressed by the work you’ve done with that dog! He really has excellent attention.” Touching her husband’s arm, she said, “You really must see this dog. It takes a very special person to train a malamute. You deserve a lot of credit, Holly.”

“Thank you,” said a prominent member of the Cambridge Dog Training Club, just the kind of person who might help the club to select judges for its trials or, at a minimum, to put in a good word—or possibly a bad word—for a proposed judge, for example, Phyllis Abbott. But then, Rowdy and I
had
worked hard, and as for the bit about being a very special person who deserved a lot of credit, the words made me think of Anna Morelli, a very special person in her own right, but also the breeder, owner, trainer, and handler of Vanderval’s Tundra Eagle, CDX, a creature of stunning brilliance and commanding presence, and also, as it happens, not that I want to make a big deal of it or anything, not that I’m laying claim to a share of Tundra’s achievements, or Anna Morelli’s, either,
but.… Well, let me just mention in passing, simply as a matter of potential minor interest to canine genealogists, that Tundra and Kimi happen to be first cousins. Make of it what you will. Preferably two UDX’s, of course, but if you felt like tossing in a couple of OTCH’s, too, I wouldn’t exactly object, and neither, I’m sure, would Anna Morelli.

When we reached Cam and Ginny’s table, I was a little surprised to find Joy and her G-man look-alike husband, Craig, there, too. “They,” Ginny said, apparently referring to Joy and Craig, “have a Cairn, and he’s been through basic obedience, and he has a nice temperament, and I’m telling them to go ahead and try the CGC test this afternoon.”

Cam carefully set her plate on the table. “Sure,” she agreed. “You’ve got nothing to lose, except whatever it is, eight dollars or something. If he doesn’t pass this time, you find out what you have to work on, and you go home and work on it, and then one of these days you give it another try.”

“Yes, go ahead,” I advised. “Nothing bad’s going to happen. It should be fun.” I finished layering a lot of cheap cold cuts and a great many paper-thin slices of cheese on the bottom half of a roll that looked soft and felt stale. I piled on tomatoes and near-white lettuce, and, on the theory that if you add enough grease, almost anything tastes good, I spooned on a big glob of mayonnaise. I put on the top half of the roll, pressed it down, lifted the sandwich to my mouth, and bit in. So much for the grease theory. I left the sandwich on my plate.

I watched Craig swallow. In spite of the muscles, he had a prominent Adam’s apple. He wiped his lips. “Twenty,” he said. “Twenty dollars.”

Ginny and I exclaimed in unison, “Twenty dollars?”

“For a CGC test?” Ginny demanded.

“That’s out of line,” I informed Craig. “In fact, I wonder if … Cam, does AKC set guidelines for that? For how much you can charge?”

Too orderly a person to consume a messy salad-on-a-roll, Cam had avoided bread altogether and had arranged her food in as appetizing a fashion as the ingredients allowed. She applied her knife and fork to a slice of olive loaf, paused, shook her head, and said, “No, they don’t want to. What they say is, whatever you think is fair.”

“Well, twenty dollars isn’t very fair,” I said.

Cam nodded. “Charging a lot violates the spirit of it.”

Joy looked bewildered. “So should we not, uh, put Lucky in?”

Cam, Ginny, and I held a wordless consultation. Cam voiced our conclusion. “Go ahead, if you feel like it.”

In apparent search of information about her own feelings, Joy looked timidly at Craig, who told her, “What the heck. It’s vacation.”

I tried to remember the last time I’d heard a man Craig’s age use the word
heck.
It occurred to me that Craig and Joy might be churchgoers and that either he or Joy might find a casually spoken
hell
offensive or blasphemous.

“Are you sure?” Joy’s manner induced in me what I believe is called a “clang” association: Joy, coy.

Craig nodded. Joy beamed. “I’d better go get Lucky ready,” she said.

“Will you excuse us?” Craig asked.

Cam nodded. When Joy and Craig had left, she said, “Nice people. They deserved a decent dog.”

“They didn’t know any better.” I thought for a second. “I hope nobody tells them how awful-looking the dog is.”

“Oh,” Ginny said, “Eva Spitteler probably has, you know. That’s how she goes through life: saying awful things to people. And about people, too. What do you want to bet that’s what she’s doing right now? I’ll bet you anything she’s over there with Eric Grimaldi telling him terrible things about me. I’m getting coffee. You want some?”