Brute Strength (2 page)

As I made and served coffee, I kept hoping that Rita wouldn't think of the possible consequences of a dog bite. Unfortunately, as I put her mug on the table in front of her, she asked, ‘What happens now? The hospital is going to ask him about the bite.'

‘If there was one,' I said. A puncture wound might not have bled, but Quinn hadn't just claimed to have been bitten; he'd said that he was bleeding.

‘If there was,' Rita said, ‘I honestly don't think that it requires medical attention. At worst, Willie nipped him. Or pinched him. I didn't see any blood. But who knows? Quinn could still report a bite.'

‘If he does, all that'll happen is that you'll get a call from some Cambridge official, and you'll have to show Willie's rabies certificate. Steve can print you out Willie's whole history of immunizations. Don't worry about it.'

Rita fished dog hair out of her coffee. ‘I don't think that Quinn would sue me.' There was doubt in her voice.

‘Of course not. What would he sue you for? Besides, he wouldn't sue
you.
Look, his feelings were hurt. Willie was, uh, unfriendly to him.'

Rita crowed.

‘Then instead of fussing over Quinn, you made sure that Willie's paw was OK. Quinn was jealous.' I added something that I didn't believe. ‘He'll get over it.'

‘Holly, what he'll do is spend hours in therapy figuring out how he happened to get involved with a woman who loves her dog more than she loves him.'

‘Rita, you wouldn't let a patient get away with that. You did say that Quinn's in
good
therapy.'

‘He is,' she said. ‘Or I hope so.'

TWO

A
fter Rita left, I returned to the morning's tasks. In the short time since I'd stopped brushing and blowing out undercoat, Kimi and Sammy had managed to release yet more of the woolly stuff. It's not fair to blame the dogs, is it? I mean, they don't shed deliberately. They have no more control over their shedding than I do. No, the fault lies with dog hair itself, which has a perverse mind of its own. For the moment, I'd had enough of its evil ways. Once the rain stopped and the yard dried out, I'd take the dogs and the grooming equipment outside, where the neighborhood birds would do the clean-up for me. I folded the grooming table, put away the dryer, emptied the Dyson's canister, vacuumed, emptied the canister again, vacuumed yet again, and eventually returned to the task of making enemies, by which I mean turning down the applications of people who had applied to adopt dogs from our local Alaskan malamute rescue group.

I exaggerate. Screening applications can be fun. I outright love making the perfect match between a homeless dog and a wonderful applicant, and I don't mind helping people to decide that my challenging breed would be a poor match. It's no fun to disappoint people, but I'm just never going to find the right rescue malamute for the family with three Chihuahuas, five cats, two parrots, eight hamsters, six pygmy goats, thirty-five chickens, and a flock of exotic geese, especially if the resident species all get along beautifully, and the proposed dog is expected to do the same. Introduce an Alaskan malamute into the peaceable kingdom, and what you get is warfare. When I turn down an application like that one, I always think of the dogs awaiting homes and feel guilty. From the malamute viewpoint, it's a delectable home. It's hors d'oeuvres, a poultry course, a meat course . . . and here am I depriving a big, hungry dog of a week-long feast!

But the applicants I absolutely hate dealing with are the people who are going to give me a hard time, and our other volunteers feel the same way. Almost all of our applications are submitted online. There's a special section of our website where volunteers claim applications from a database. We then reply by email or by phone. The alpha figure of our organization, Betty Burley, has decreed that every applicant gets a polite response – no one disagrees – and that applications are to be claimed in the order in which they were submitted, first come, first served. In reality, troublesome-looking applications sometimes sit unclaimed for weeks. I handle them only when it's obvious that no one else is going to or when I feel like a bad human being who needs to make recompense. Good Catholics go to confession and say Hail Marys. My act of contrition consists of telling people that they won't be allowed to adopt malamutes.

‘Mrs Di Bartolomeo,' I said, having verified her identity, ‘this is Holly Winter from Malamute Rescue. Thank you for your application.'

‘Well, it's really my husband who wants one,' she said.

Question on the application:
Do all members of your household know that you plan to adopt a malamute?
At least Mr Di Bartolomeo had told his wife. Men don't always. More commonly, teenage boys don't tell their parents.

‘The application is in both names,' I said. ‘Are you familiar with malamutes? Did you read the material on our website?' The website is packed with warnings about food stealing, predatory behavior, shedding, and the notorious malamute wild streak.

‘Oh, Don did,' she said. ‘He's been after me for a dog for years, ever since his last one got killed by a car. I finally gave in.'

The husband had written that his last dog had died of cancer at the age of fifteen. If I'd checked the mandatory vet reference, I'd have uncovered the truth, but when I suspect that I'll have to reject an applicant, I don't bother to check the vet reference.

Lying to us is grounds for rejection. Besides, it offends me. In a token act of revenge, I asked, ‘Mrs Di Bartolomeo, who does the vacuuming in your house?'

‘I do.'

‘And you've been told about the shedding.'

‘Oh, that's why I gave in.'

‘Pardon me?'

‘Don says that they don't shed. A medium-sized dog that doesn't shed. That's what I told him he could get.'

I broke the news. Our conversation ended.

I made two more calls and left voice messages. Then I reached a man named Irving Jensen, who lived in Lynn, an industrial city on the coast about ten miles north of Boston that's best known as the subject of the following piece of folkloric doggerel:

So far as I knew, Lynn was, in reality, no more sinful than dozens of other Massachusetts communities, and I'd known excellent dog owners who lived there. What made Jensen's application one of my Hail Marys was that he'd stated that he didn't believe in fences. Also, he was equally opposed to neutering dogs. Jensen and I spoke briefly.

‘All of our dogs are spayed or neutered,' I informed him.

‘I want one that ain't,' he said.

‘That's your privilege, but you can't get one from us.'

‘Why not?'

‘It's the policy of my organization.' I'd learned long ago that it was a waste of time to elaborate: breeding should be done selectively and seldom; we almost never knew the genetic history of our rescue dogs; we didn't need to create business for ourselves; and so on. The valid points never convinced an applicant like Irving Jensen; on the contrary, they fueled arguments. I added, ‘Every other reputable rescue group has the same policy.'

‘You're telling me you're going to kill these dogs before you give one to me?'

‘We almost never have to euthanize dogs unless they're sick and in pain.'

‘Bullshit,' he said.

Swear at a volunteer, and you don't get a dog. I said goodbye and hung up. Jensen had been impossible, anyway. Among other things, although he'd stated on his application that he'd owned a lot of dogs over the years, he'd provided no vet reference. Instead, he'd written: ‘Dogs were healthy. Never needed a vet.'

Before Rita and Quinn's fight, in between grooming Sammy and Kimi, I'd replied to applications from a man named Hollis, a woman named Jenna, and a couple called Blatherwicke. The last of my Hail Mary calls was to Eldon Flood, whose application stated that he and his wife, Lucinda, wanted a dog to tag along with them on their farm the way their last dog, a Border collie mix, had done. According to the application, the Floods had no fenced yard, no kennel, and no dog crate. No vet reference was given. Calling the Floods might not even qualify as doing penance. Once they'd talked with me for a few minutes, they'd probably decide on their own to look for a different breed.

As it turned out, when I reached Eldon Flood, he immediately asked, ‘How much you want for them?'

‘There are a few things we need to discuss,' I said. ‘I see that you want a dog who'll stay right with you.'

‘Yeah.'

I gave a detailed explanation of the need to keep malamutes on leash except in fully-fenced areas, the same explanation that appears on the web.

‘That's just if you don't train 'em right,' said Eldon Flood.

Kudos to me! I was patient. I said that I'd been training dogs and showing in obedience since childhood; that two of my malamutes had advanced obedience titles; and that malamutes were radically different from the golden retrievers I'd had previously.

‘You gotta understand,' he said. ‘I got a special knack with dogs. Like a gift, you know? I like the look of this one called Thunder. How much you want for him?'

‘I can't approve your application,' I said. ‘This is just not the right breed for you. If you want to read up on malamutes and reconsider, you're welcome to get back to me.' I gave him my home phone number. ‘But at the moment, I can't approve your application.' The phone went dead. At least he hadn't sworn at me or accused me of murdering dogs.

As if Rita and Quinn's fight, the Di Bartolomeos, Irving Jensen, and Eldon Flood weren't enough, I'd no sooner hung up than that damned Pippy Neff called me. Pippy was a somewhat disreputable malamute breeder who showed her dogs all the time, much to the irritation of those of us who also showed and who did so in the hope of having fun, a hope more easily realized in Pippy's absence than in her presence. The second I heard her distinctive voice on the phone, I knew what she wanted. Her demands for Rowdy's stud services had started at a show when she'd pointed at the gorgeous boy and announced, ‘I'm using him.' As if I had no choice! When Pippy had followed up by calling and emailing me, I'd put her off by saying, truthfully, that I'd need information about Rowdy's proposed mate: health clearances, hip and eye certifications, the results of a recent thyroid test, and so forth. While failing to send any such thing, Pippy had continued to plague me.

‘Pippy,' I said, ‘I've told you that no one uses Rowdy until I've seen clearances. Send them, and we'll talk.'

‘Goddamn it, there's nothing wrong with Nifty's hips,' she said. Some people sing off-key. Pippy somehow managed to speak off-key. ‘You've seen Nifty.' Tundrabilt's Pretty Nifty. Pippy Neff used an egotistical system of nomenclature: Tundrabilt's Perfectly Neat, Power Now, Pretty Nifty, and so on. Indeed, Positively Narcissistic. I had, in fact, seen Nifty in the show ring. I'd also tried to look her up in the online database maintained by the Orthopedic Foundation for Animals. The database, available at
http://www.offa.org
, has information about eye exam results and other health matters, but OFA is principally known for its ratings of hip X-rays. Nifty's absence didn't necessarily mean that she had hip dysplasia. My guess was that Pippy had been too cheap to send hip X-rays to OFA or hadn't had X-rays done at all. I'd have bet anything that she hadn't paid for PennHip, which is an alternative system for evaluating hips. It's excellent and costly.

‘Pippy, we've been through this,' I said. ‘My mother was a breeder, and one thing she drilled into me is that any stud dog I own is unavailable unless I see those clearances. This has nothing to do with Nifty. She's beautiful. She looks sound, but I don't have X-ray vision. It's just a policy I have. No exceptions. It's nothing personal.'

Pippy was obnoxious, but she wasn't stupid. ‘Well, I take it personally. It's an insult to Nifty, and it's an insult to me.'

‘I'm sorry if you take it that way. That's not how it's meant.'

‘You entered on Saturday?' she asked.

‘No. Rowdy and Sammy are both out of coat. But I might go anyway.'

‘If you do, we'll talk,' she said.

Threat or promise?

THREE

I
n case any of my rejected applicants decided to call back and argue with me, I got out of the house. The rain had stopped, and the dogs and I needed exercise. My cousin Leah was supposed to take Kimi running, so Sammy and I set out by ourselves. We live at the corner of Concord Avenue and Appleton Street. At big-dog pace, we're about twenty minutes from Harvard Square, Fresh Pond, or the Charles River. The square is the dogs' favorite destination. It offers the delectable combination of a big potential audience and an ample supply of discarded food, but I felt like stretching my legs without having Sammy draw a crowd and try to wolf down trash. On a Saturday afternoon, the trail around Fresh Pond would be thick with off-leash dogs, including dog-aggressive dogs presumably turned loose on the theory that after repeatedly attacking innocent dogs like mine, the miscreants would mull over the folly of their behavior and spontaneously decide to reform:
Geez, now that I've devoured two Yorkshire terriers, the left ear of a Lab, and miscellaneous body parts of six or eight other breeds, I've come to realize that other dogs are, after all, my dearest friends, and I have vowed henceforth to be Mr Socialization!

So, Sammy and I headed up Appleton Street toward the river. Our block of Appleton was once part of a pleasant working-class and middle-class neighborhood, but the area has been glorified by proximity to the ivy-choked league-of-its-own institution from which my cousin Leah was about to graduate. Once you cross Huron and head uphill toward Brattle Street, however, you soon come to big, grand houses that beg to be gawked at. If I'm feeling powerless in real life, I imagine that any house of my choosing will be mine and that my task is to select and reject as I please: the mauve place with twenty or thirty rooms is tempting, but its yard is too small. The creamy-yellow colonial might make my cut if it were set farther from the street. My dogs certainly do not share this fantasy. Rather, being dogs, they pay closer attention to scent than to sight. What they smell in the vicinity of Brattle Street just has to be money.