Ruffly Speaking (23 page)

“That’s a point. So who...? The son could’ve, in theory. He lives there; he has access to the animal. And the owner. She does.”

“And if Ruffly ran loose, Alice Savery, too. But I don’t believe her; I don’t think he’s ever loose. Ivan? Steve, I really don’t think he’d hit a dog. He gets himself in a lot of trouble, and, admittedly, he does hang around Alice Savery’s, but probably not as much as she thinks he does.”

“Enough to become background noise?”

“I don’t know.”

“Me, neither,” Steve said.

“If we cut down here on Reservoir, we’ll go right by there,” I suggested. “You want to see the house?”

Neither of us expected Morris Lamb’s house to tell us anything, and, in fact, it didn’t. When we reached the little path that led to the backyard, the motion sensor detected us, and the floodlights came on. If Ruffly barked, I didn’t hear him. Alice Savery’s house was entirely dark, and, except in one upstairs room—Matthew’s, I guess—so was Stephanie’s. Even so, Steve and I lingered for a few minutes to ponder the question of whether a dog writer and a veterinarian could find happiness in a neighborhood that neither could afford, even pooling resources, i In front of Alice Savery’s, I deliberately edged Rowdy toward the famous fence. “Rowdy, lift your leg!” I urged him. All he did was sniff.

Class traitor.

23

 “Fyodor! Not with your fingers! And if you’d stop wiggling, the avocado garnish wouldn’t slip, would it?” Doug’s distant scolding was barely audible over the lunchtime clatter in what must have been the kitchen at Winer & Lamb. His voice suddenly boomed in my ear: “Doug Winer. How may I help you?”

“Doug, it’s Holly Winter. I’m sorry to bother you.”

“It’s
bedlam
here,” Doug exclaimed happily, “and the decorators are insisting on closing us down so the painters can get in, and, well, it’s a perfect madhouse!” Doug’s elation in the face of self-created chaos was weirdly and uniquely Morris Lamb’s.

“You’re redecorating?”

“
Long,
long overdue.” Doug sounded like an especially grim bill collector. “The competition is ferocious. If We neglect the café, we’ll go under.”

As I’d done dozens of times before, I assured Doug that everything at Winer & Lamb was always wonderful.

Then I got to the point. Had Morris’s Bedlingtons shown any behavior that even remotely resembled Ruffly’s episodes? Had Morris’s dogs had any mysterious ailments? Had there ever been anything...?

Nelson, Doug promptly reported, had once eaten forty-three dollars in cash, but it hadn’t done him any harm. Was that what I meant?

No, not really, I said. I thanked Doug, anyway. While I had him on the phone, I asked about Ivan, but Doug didn’t recognize the name. He certainly knew that the neighborhood children plagued Alice Savery, but, according to Doug, Morris had never had a problem with them, and they never bothered the other neighbors, either.

“Good God! They’re not after Stephanie, are they?” Doug sounded serious and alarmed.

“No, I really don’t think so. It’s just that we’re trying to find some explanation of what’s going on with Ruffly.” I used a phrase of Steve’s. “We’re casting a wide net.”

“She’s not making herself
interesting,
is she?”

“Stephanie?”

“Because that’s positively the worst thing to do. Morris kept trying to persuade Miss Savery that if she’d stop making herself
interesting,
then the children would find someone else to torment, but, of course, Miss Savery wouldn’t listen.”

Morris seemed a wildly improbable source of that good advice. Making himself interesting was one of Morris Lamb’s great pleasures. With me, at least, he’d always succeeded. The reflection and, in fact, my entire conversation with Doug Winer, left me in a peculiar mood that interfered with my work. Even at my most productive, I’d have found it difficult to get serious about a talking dog collar (“Pat me! Pat me!” “Clip my nails? Just try it!”) or a kitchen utensil specially designed to get every last glob of pet food out of the can, and the prospect of advising the readers of
Dog’s Life
to buy an aerosol pet repeller was ludicrous.

My mail didn’t help. In addition to the electric bill and a bunch of dog magazines, it brought an envelope from Dog’s Life containing a letter from some guy who must have read my column without understanding a word I’d ever written.
“Dear Holly,"
it said. “
My
last dog died about four months ago, and I’m starting to think about a new one. What I want is a dog that can wander around the neighborhood and make friends and not get into
trouble. What kind of dog can you let run loose?”

I grabbed some stationery and scrawled the only honest answer:
“Any dog you don’t love.”

Truthful, yes.Helpful, no. I tore up my letter. How could one of my readers possibly ask such a question? Like every other member of my profession, I’d already answered it hundreds of times: The free-Rover makes so many enemies that when he’s finally hit by a car, the neighbors want to dance in the streets. As if to confirm my sense that any further dispensing of advice would be useless, noise broke out overhead: Willie began yet one more of the prolonged fits of senseless barking that I’d repeatedly told Rita how to cure. Until that afternoon, I’d limited myself to lecturing Rita. Now I took action— and, no, not with one of those damned no-bark shock collars and not with ultrasound, either. The radical remedy? My landlady key admitted me to Rita’s apartment, where I set up a portable crate, into which I locked the protesting Scottie, one pressed-rawhide bone, and one Gumabone Plaque Attacker, its hollow middle filled with freshly melted cheese. Then I stomped downstairs and muffled the yapping with the cotton I use to clean the dogs’ ears. Instant magic? No. Willie wasn’t a tough case. It took twenty minutes for him to fall silent.

My sense of professional competence restored, I

made a big cup of Bustelo and whipped off a column that began with the letter I’d just received, moved to phony expressions of regret that the days of the free-range neighborhood dog were over, and ended with an analysis of the anthropomorphism inherent in the romantic idealization of the loose dog as a symbol of spiritual freedom, which, by the way, is just what the roaming dog symbolizes. So does death.

By the time I’d finished, I was drenched in caffeine sweat, and Rowdy and Kimi were pleading for their overdue dinner, so I fed them, put them in the yard, took a shower, and, of all things, got so dressed up that when Steve arrived, he decided that I must have forgotten that we were going out to dinner. Whenever he sees me wearing anything fancier than kennel clothes, he assumes that I’m on my way to or from a show.

We ate at a little Indian restaurant on Beacon Street in Brookline. My main course was a mild spinach concoction,
palak paneer
(evidently meaning
baby food,
not bad), but Steve ordered three kinds of bread, a dish of fiery citrus pickles, a salad that tasted like glowing embers, and a curry that would’ve done as the penultimate test in the Bombay licensing exam for flame swallowers. After a few bites, he started mopping his head and face, and all through the meal, he kept pouring down beer and exclaiming about how great everything tasted. Even so, I drove us home along a circuitous route that happened to lead us to Toscanini’s in Central Square, where we stocked up on mouth-bum remedies to take back to Appleton Street.

When we arrived, Leah and Matthew were at the kitchen table consuming ramen noodles, Leah with evident satisfaction, Matthew with the expression of a dog given a half-cup of low-cal chunks in place of his usual bowlful of Joy Demand laced with safflower oil to make his coat shine. I decided that with a person as inexpressive as Matthew, any show of anything resembling emotion was preferable to the usual watered-down, no-cal, no-taste, invalid-bland affective diet that he seemed to self-prescribe as a preventive antidote for human feelings.

But, of course, Leah’s friends are always welcome in my house.

In even sharper than usual contrast to Matthew, Leah was radiant with excitement tonight. She couldn’t wait for Matthew to conclude his rise-when-a-lady-enters jack-in-the-box trick to begin spilling out her news, which, in characteristic Leah fashion, wasn’t even her own, but Matthew’s, except, I suppose, to the extent that it concerned a dog. Despite the sticky city heat of a gusty July evening doomed to end in a night of thunder, Leah wore black tights topped by swathes of black jersey. She’d tried to subdue the unsophisticated exuberance of her red-gold curls, too, but the humidity had betrayed her. On the crown of her head, an elasticized black velvet ribbon was losing the struggle to retain its grip on a thick mass of hair. A cloudlike halo of escaped bronze tendrils framed her flushed, eager face.
(Cloudlike.
You noticed? Indeed, the ad copy for Wonder Fluff dog shampoo. There’s an off-chance that Leah had actually used it.)

“Ruffly
saved
Matthew’s mother!” she exclaimed. “You have to hear all about it!”

Most of the time, I manage to ignore Leah’s resemblance to my own mother—the voice, the astonishing hair, the remarkable way with dogs—but once in a while, when Leah catches me off-guard, I feel as if I’ve encountered Marissa’s ghost. With my mother, too, no one ever bad much choice about hearing all about everything. On this occasion I really was eager to hear all about Ruffly. The piece about him had turned out pretty well, but, after mailing it, I’d realized that something was missing: a good rescue story. If it hadn’t been Friday night, I might even have dashed to the phone to tell my editor to put the article on hold. Monday morning would be soon enough. I’ll also confess something: As a
person,
I genuinely hoped that Leah’s news was about some trivial incident that hadn’t even alarmed Stephanie. As a
dog writer?
Well, I prayed that little Ruffly hadn’t merely nudged Stephanie away from a slow-moving vehicle or warned her about a minor grease fire, but had heroically dragged his large-framed and bosomy mistress from the brink of some major, eminently publishable, and preferably ecclesiastical disaster.

“Oh,” I said, disguising these warring emotions. “What happened?”

By now, Steve had dished up and distributed the ice cream, and Matthew seemed more intent on working away at his bowl of vanilla than on enriching my forthcoming contribution to canine, ahem, literature, but maybe he simply accepted the inevitable. When Leah is bent on holding the floor, it’s useless to compete.

“It just happened! Right after Stephanie got home, she went out to the deck, and you know how there’s a big gas grill there?” The question was one in intonation only; Leah didn’t pause long enough for me to nod, but went breathlessly on. “There’s one of those built-in grills, and she’d been out to dinner, and after she got home, she made some coffee and went out to the deck because Matthew won’t let her smoke in the house.”

Stephanie had mentioned the ban. I remember how surprised I’d been to learn that she smoked at all. I still was. I glanced at Matthew, who was almost frowning. It occurred to me that I might be misjudging him. Maybe he was just hard to read, like a tailless shaggy dog with a curtain of hair permanently drawn over his face.

Leah was gesturing enthusiastically with a spoonful of ice cream. “And Stephanie sat down, and there
_was
... You know how windy it is? And she sat where the wind was blowing away from the grill, and she was just about to light her cigarette, but Ruffly bumped her arm, and then he just stood there staring at the grill, practically like a statue, and then Stephanie got up, and when she got really close to the grill, she could smell the gas. The valve wasn’t all the way off, and if it hadn’t been for Ruffly, especially if the wind had changed, she’d have been blown up!”

“How did Ruffly know?” I asked.

“You can hear it,” Matthew answered. “My mother can’t hear it, but the gas hisses a little. And if she’d been paying any attention, she would’ve smelled it.”

“No, she wouldn’t,” Leah said firmly. “Not with the wind blowing away, would she?”

“Well, it wouldn’t make much difference,” I said. “What she should’ve noticed wouldn’t really matter. Steve, would Ruffly have responded to the gas? To the smell?”