Paws before dying (6 page)

“You want to see something?” I said to Leah. “Watch over there, the Utility ring. You see the silver standard poodle?”

“He was there the other night.”

“That’s the one. And opposite is Heather, his handler, right? With the silver hair?”

“So?”

“So look in back of Heather, outside the ring. You see that really skinny woman with long brown hair? In the green flowered shirt?”

“Yeah.”

“Notice that her arms are crossed. Her hands are closed, sort of in fists, as if she’s got something in them. And she’s watching the dog, right? That’s called double handling. That’s Heather’s daughter, Abbey, and they’ve practiced this routine so they’ve got it cold. It’s illegal to take food into the ring, but the dog’s been taught there’s something in Abbey’s hand, liver or something, and Abbey stations herself where the dog can see her. If the dog starts to break, she probably moves her hand a little, or does something, something really subtle.”

“That’s cheating!”

“It’s a mother and daughter act,” I said.

The silver poodle didn’t break, of course. I watched until the end. Then I heard a deep male voice hollering.

At the edge of the field closest to the parking lot, Rose’s exstudent, Willie, was leaning on the long registration table. He seemed to be filling out an entry form. He looked as if he might be trying to bury his face in it. His blond German shepherd lay on the ground at his feet. About five yards beyond the end of the table, another blond young man was shouting at another shepherd, a cowering, snarling dog that kept lunging toward him.

“Kaiser, you bastard, down!” he yelled, and he yanked hard on the dog’s collar.

“Is he supposed to be doing that?” Leah sat up. “Oh, God. You know who that is? And that’s Righteous and what’s his name, Willie. That’s his brother. The one—”

“Next door to Rose and Jack. Yeah. And no. He isn’t supposed to be doing that. Someone will speak to him. What are they doing here, anyway?”

“Bess gave us the fliers, remember? But you said—”

“I did, and it’s not allowed.”

Even from a distance I could see that the brother’s shepherd had a long, soft, silky coat—undesirable in the breed—that needed a shampoo. If the dog had been scrubbed, I guessed, his pale fur would have looked washed out, not rich like the first dog’s. When his handler took a step ahead, the dog suddenly jerked his head toward the man. It looked to me as if he tried to bite him. The man retaliated. He raised an arm and smashed the dog hard on the flank, and the dog yelped. In his unceasing hope that a fabulous dog fight would break out and that he could launch himself in the center of it, Rowdy leapt up, and Kimi, the radical feminist, joined him. If I’d stayed on the blanket, Rowdy could easily have hauled me across the field and into the shepherd’s jaws, but I stood up, got a good grip on his lead, braced myself, and told him to sit. He did. Without being asked, Leah took charge of Kimi. In fact, she seemed so capable of managing the dogs that I started to hand her Rowdy’s lead— I intended to step in, but not with Rowdy—when I saw that one of the judges, a man I didn’t know, was finally going to intervene.

“There’s a judge,” I told Leah. “And somebody else. That is totally forbidden. You aren’t allowed to do anything more than a little warm-up. You can’t even really train, and hitting a dog is totally against the rules. At a show, they’d make him leave the grounds. I don’t know what they’ll do here.”

The judges and the officials running the match were slow to respond, because, I suppose, they were as surprised as I was. Once in a while, someone who hasn’t bothered to read the rule book starts training at a show or talks a little loudly to a dog, and dogs occasionally get aggressive, but most shows, trials, and matches are harmonious. The human participants who worship dogs, and the few who train harshly do so only in private, partly because they know the rules and partly because they want to avoid creating a bad public impression of the sport.

“That’s
my
judge,” Leah said proudly. “What’s he saying?”

“He’s probably telling him to leave.”

By then, the shepherd, beaten into submission, was lying quietly by his owner. The judge was obviously lecturing. One of people from the Lincoln Kennels, a guy who has shelties, was standing nearby with his arms folded over his chest. Suddenly the blond handler hauled on the dog’s lead, dragged the poor shepherd to his feet, and shouted at the judge so that everyone heard: “Well, screw you! You hear that? Screw all of you!” Heading for the parking lot, he added, “Come on, Willie. Let's get the hell out of here.”

“Poor Willie,” Leah said. “How totally embarrassing.”

“Jesus,” I said. “The poor dog. And the poor judge. You know, things like this don’t happen. This is not what it’s like.”

“I saw a bumper sticker on a car the other day,” Leah said. “It said: ‘Shit happens.’ I couldn’t figure out what it meant. I guess this is what it meant.” She looked at me and smiled.

She had that special gift of making things all right again. One of her other gifts was King Solomon’s ring, the one that let him talk with animals. She and Kimi ended up with an impressive 192 1/2 (out of that perfect 200) and a second-place ribbon. Rowdy, who lost points for slowing down before the drop and for some sloppy sits, got a 187 and third place. Four ribbons — two for qualifying, two for placing—is pretty spectacular if the two dogs are Alaskan malamutes and it’s one handler’s first time in the ring.

The standard color for a first-place ribbon at a trial is blue, but at a match, it’s rose. I’d missed the Utility awards, but on the way out, we ran into the suitably named Rose Englemanj who had her first-place ribbon in one hand and Caprice’s thin blue lead in the other. Caprice was bouncing around and showing off.

“Congratulations,” I said to both of them. Then I got down; to business. “How did Heather do?”

“Second,” Rose said. “By one point.” Handlers like Rose and Heather, I might add, often enter fun matches noncompetitively. That night, though, each had clearly decided that the other’s presence justified her own competition. Even so, Rose did not brag about her own score. She didn’t even tell me what it was.

Í like to remember her exactly as she was in those few minutes on that sultry night, a first-place ribbon in one hand, her dog’s lead in the other, listening with the enthusiasm of an ardent! newcomer as Leah went on and on about things that Rose must have heard a thousand times. She’d heard them all before, but she never heard them again. The next evening, as I learned later,; she took Caprice to the abandoned tennis court at Eliot Park-As they were training, the heat and humidity that had been building over the past few days finally broke in another of the violent electric storms and downpours we’d been having all summer. Rose was prepared for the rain, I heard. She had on a set of those waterproof pants and jackets you usually see on runners about a third her age. Jack gave her the outfit for Christmas, he told me later. He picked out the color to match her eyes: electric blue. Maybe he’d had a premonition. Lightning strikes farmers. It hits people who are swimming or fishing or playing golf. I’d never heard of it killing anyone who was out training a dog, but ordinary handlers quit when rain starts. Top handlers train for all weather conditions and all distractions. If the Flood itself had let loose and God had boomed out a Commandment, Caprice would have been prepared. Maybe Caprice was. It was Rose who reached out and touched the metal door of the all-metal chain link fence.

Chapter 6

THE human denizens of dogdom are America’s last true villagers. Every kennel club is a tiny town with strong home-group loyalties and a complex network of bonds with its neighbors: ties of history, rivalry, and divided allegiance. Like villagers flooding a market town, we gather
en masse
at dog shows, not only to transact our practical business but to renew our sense of oneness with our fellow citizens of the great and noble Republic of the American Kennel Club.

Bess Stein, Leah’s Novice instructor at the AKC-member Nonantum Dog Training Club, had been judging lately at States Kennel Club and Continental Dog Association trials as well as teaching at two clubs on the south shore. During World War II, she worked with my own Cambridge Dog Training Club in the Dogs for Defense program that recruited and trained canine soldiers, and more than a decade afterward, she bought a golden retriever from my mother. All this is to say that it was Bess who called me on Saturday afternoon with the news of Rose Engle-man’s death by lightning.

I heard the phone ring only because I’d come inside to refill my glass with real lemonade and Leah’s with fake. In the arid ninety degrees, Leah and I were playing Tom Sawyer with the section of fence that encloses the Appleton Street and driveway corner of my yard. We wore old T-shirts and jeans of mine— big on me, small on her—that had descended even below my relaxed standards for kennel clothes. Daubs of white Benjamin Moore augmented the bright freckles on Leah’s arms and nose
^a
nd the paler ones on mine.

I’m awkwardly blunt at breaking bad news, and especially because Leah had seemed so self-confident and almost nerveless, like a human malamute, I was unprepared for her sobbing. When I’d jammed the lid on the paint can and dropped the brushes in a bucket of water, I put my arm around her shoulders, and
I
could feel her shaking. We sat in the shade on the paint-spattered grass.

“I shouldn’t have told you so...,” I started to say. “Bess just called.”

“Did it hurt her a lot?” Leah was crying so hard that I had trouble making out the words. I found her suddenly a child and myself suddenly the grown-up.

“I don’t think so. It must’ve been almost instant. I don’t know if it hurt. But if it did, it was only for a second. She was in the tennis court, at the park, where we had class the other night. This was last night, just before dark, when we had all the thunder. Remember?”

She nodded.

“It must’ve happened just when she was leaving. The lightning must have hit just when she was opening the door.” The door, of course, was metal. So was the entire high chain link fence surrounding the tennis court. Did the metal bum? Did it hurt? I wanted a real grown-up to assure me that it hadn’t. “Jack found her.”

“What about Caprice?”

“She came home alone. That’s how Jack knew something was wrong, because Caprice came home without Rose. He heard her scratching at the door. He went to look and he found Rose.”

“Holly?”

“Yes.”

“Could we not paint anymore now?”

A few minutes earlier, we’d both been Tom Sawyer. Now I was Aunt Polly, a character, I might add, I’d never liked: the enemy, the ultimate adult. Death means that someone has to be the grown-up, the person who gets stuck pretending to know what the hell is going on. When it comes to dogs, of course, I do know what the hell is going on, at least most of the time, and I don’t mind explaining it to them and telling them what we’re going to do about it and why. But when it comes to people? If Leah hadn’t been crying and asking questions, if she hadn’t been there at all, I’d probably have thrown a clean pair of jeans, a toothbrush, and my dogs into the car and driven to Owls Head, Maine, where Rose’s death would have been far away and where no one—certainly not my father—would have expected me to pay attention to the needs of human beings. I’d have written Jack a letter, sent a donation to a good cause, and, when some time had passed, I’d have talked with people about what a great handler Rose was.

One of the advantages of living alone—not that anyone with two malamutes is really alone—is never having to explain why you have to leave town. You put the dogs in the car and go. There is no one—a cousin, for instance—who might assume that you’re running away. My mother disapproved of running away. Every time one of our dogs died—and with a lot of dogs, you have a lot of deaths—she made me watch everything, including the burials, especially the burials, because I was supposed to say good-bye and understand it was for keeps. The last one I watched was her own. I haven’t been to a funeral since then. They all feel like hers.

We did not, of course, have to paint anymore. We washed the paint off our hands and sat glumly in the kitchen drinking tea, patting the dogs, and talking about Rose. To mourn Rose, we still wore our ragged old jeans and shirts, as if we’d torn our clothes in grief.

“I want to send flowers,” Leah said. “Would roses be stupid?”

“No, of course not, only you don’t usually send flowers. It’s not a Jewish custom. You send a basket of fruit or something. Or you take food. Or...”

“So we can’t...”

“Actually, I don’t know. Rose wasn’t Jewish, but Jack is. I know because one time Rose and I both took a handling seminar sometime around Christmas, and Vera—that was her last poodle, before Caprice—had on one of those Christmas collars. With lights? It’s a regular collar, but it has little green and red lights. They’re powered by a little battery in the collar, and they twinkle off and on.”

“Isn’t that dangerous?”

“No. It’s only a nine-volt battery or something. Anyhow, when Rose walked in, Vera had on this collar, which wasn’t exactly like putting up a Christmas tree, but... Anyway, they did both, Christmas and Hanukkah, or maybe he didn’t do Christmas, but she did both. Besides, her name was Rose Marie.”