Ruffly Speaking (29 page)

Now ponder the typical abduction story, which goes something like this: At nine o’clock on the evening of September 3, 1993, a woman we shall call Violet J. is driving her two-year-old tan Ford Escort from Hoboken to Hackensack when she experiences the first interesting event of her thirty-six years, the previous ten of which she’s spent explaining the difference between universal and term insurance policies and selling both. After work, she watches television game shows while eating Rice-A-Roni. Her social life consists of occasional visits to discount shopping malls. Once in a while she treats herself to a wild fling by risking the price of a postage stamp to enter the Publishers’ Clearinghouse Sweepstakes. She always promises herself that if she’s ever the lucky winner of the Grand Prize, she won’t change her life-style one iota.

Ah, but something will. Enter Ralph, Doris, and the kids. In the driver’s seat of the Escort on the road to Hackensack, Violet has just reached forward and switched from a talk-radio discussion of household stain removal to a golden oldies station when a blinding burst of light appears, weird bells tinkle, and distant whistles sound. Some six hours later, a frightened and disoriented Violet finds herself in the passenger seat of the Ford Escort, which is inexplicably parked next to a foul-smelling Dumpster at the rear of the same pet shop where she once bought a gerbil that died three days later. At first Violet recalls nothing of the minutes immediately preceding those lost hours, but over the next few days, fragments return. She recalls that rubbing alcohol will remove ink from carpets and that Jerry Lee Lewis was singing “Great Balls of Fire.” After that? Floating through space. Paralysis. Looming gray figures.

Hold it. Zillions of light years crammed in a flying saucer with whining kids for the sole purpose of spacenapping
Violet?
Come on! Sorry, Violet, but these beings don’t want insurance, Rice-A-Roni, game shows, Ford Escorts, or anything else you have to offer. What’s the one thing on earth worth that miserable trip through the great celestial three-dog everlasting night? Certainly not Violet. And not just any dog, either. After all, the cosmos is an infinite Antarctica. Of course. An Alaskan malamute.

But they won’t get mine. Even co-ownership is out of the question. It’s nothing but trouble. The last person I co-owned a dog with was my own mother, and I’ll never do it again. My will weakens only when I watch Leah train Kimi. Leah is a great natural dog trainer, very charming, endlessly persistent, and so outrageously and implicitly bossy that she’d never undermine her authority by raising that sweet, rich, domineering voice.

At four-thirty on the afternoon of July 4, about twenty minutes after I’d arrived home from Stephanie’s, I was sprawled on the landing of the steps that lead down to my fenced yard. I was practicing the popular obedience training technique that consists of drinking coffee while your dog sleeps. The temperature had reached the high eighties. Rowdy was indoors snoozing under his air conditioner in my bedroom. I was reviving myself with iced Bustelo and supervising the spiritual development of that rank-novice postulant, my cousin Leah, who had yet to attain the elevated state of enlightenment that consists of knowing nothing whatsoever about your field of greatest expertise. Leah continued to harbor the illusion that in dog training, as in all other meditative endeavors, an objective truth exists out there somewhere and that revelation is reached by way of hard work. Novice that she Was, she’d drenched herself and Kimi with the garden hose and was praying in the shade cast by the high brick Wall of the luxury grooming spa and Malamute Rescue haven temporarily known as someone else’s spite building.

The no-force technique Leah was applying
—binding
—consists of using a short lead to clamp the dog to your left side in perfect heel position while you simultaneously pour on praise for the flawless heeling you’ve set the dog up to execute. Leah was making cheerful noises to hold Kimi’s attention, moving quickly enough to keep Kimi prancing happily along, murmuring heartfelt praise, and not giving Kimi a single opportunity to make a mistake. No force? No choice. I wished Bernie Brown were there to watch. As top handlers go, Bernie holds an unusually high opinion of Alaskan malamutes as competitive obedience dogs. His published view on the matter is that they make nice pets. I wonder, though, whether he understands that binding could have been designed for the breed. After all, Bernie Brown’s approach is the only one to capitalize on the universal conviction of Alaskan malamutes that since they’re smarter than everyone else, they’re absolutely always right.

Hubris.

Well, yes. Hubris
is
one of the ten most popular dog names in Cambridge. But what I had in mind was the foundation bitch, so to speak: the arrogance of mortals who imagine themselves equal to the gods, the fatal flaw that stood between Oedipus and his Elysian OTCH. That was back in the old days, of course, before Bernie Brown. I’m serious. Take Oedipus. With Bernie Brown handling, the guy wouldn’t even have
seen
his mother, never mind had the chance to you-know-what. And where would that have left Freud? In the absence of the name, in the absence of the event itself, would the concept have entirely eluded Freud? Does insight require the correct proper noun, which itself requires individuals to remain on their allotted continents in their assigned centuries instead of zipping around through space and time like Ralph and Doris on their pitiful whine-ridden excuse for what started as a happy family excursion, but turned into a galactic nightmare when Aaron and Hazel threw a con-joint celestial temper tantrum and, in an unprecedented moment of unanimity, refused to settle for the likes of Violet?

But what about Violet herself?Ralph’s fault for getting lost? Doris’s fault for misreading the map? Violet doesn’t know, though. All that terror, all that suffering, and no explanation. No-fault divorce, no-fault car insurance, fine, but no-fault alien abduction? The hand of fate?

Violet might be persuaded to buy that explanation, but only because the sole companion animal she’s had in thirty-six years is the gerbil that died. Violet does not own a dog. She does not train dogs. She knows nothing of the Brownian revolution. I am not Violet. I use Bernie Brown’s methods as they suit me and my dogs, and as I understand it, that’s exactly how he intends them to be used. I am no recent convert, I am not Leah, but I am convinced that the most effective way to train is to present no choice except the correct one, and, overall, I agree that the hand of fate is the hand of the handler, the voice of fate the handler’s, the mistakes, the blame, the fault.

Leah has switched exercises. She’s practicing what’s called the come fore, the part of the recall that consists of having the dog position herself straight in front of the handler. With Kimi still on the twenty-one-inch lead, Leah moves forward and then calls “Kimi, come!” Simultaneously, Leah backs up, takes a seat in an invisible chair, and brings Kimi into the chute formed by her bent knees. Guaranteed perfection? Not quite. Kimi is not directly in front of Leah, but twists toward Leah’s right side, all too ready to go around to heel position. Her forepaws are not even. The left rests on the grass a good inch ahead of the right. An
error!
Whose fault? Leah’s. Notice her feet, the right toe an inch in front of the left. Peer into Leah’s right hand. Fastidious adolescent, she dislikes the taste of Redi-Liver and shies from the dead-center, mouth-to-jaw spit. Kimi’s error. Leah’s fault.

Morris picked the greens, Morris made the salad, Morris ate it. How could he have been so stupid? Morris’s fatal error. If the grill had exploded? In a way, Matthew was right. His mother knew she shouldn’t smoke. Stephanie’s fault. And Ruffly was charged with hearing for her. If he had failed to detect the gas? Then Ruffly’s fault, too. But the grill hadn’t exploded. Kimi had sat crooked, too.

Only a few minutes earlier, bound to Leah’s side, Kimi had been deliberately set up to take credit for perfect heeling, and she had heeled perfectly, too. She’d had no choice. Any experienced dog trainer would have realized, however, that at this stage of training, most of the credit belonged not to the dog but to the handler. Old-fashioned trainers would have disapproved. They’d have told Leah to keep Kimi on a loose lead and to treat every error as the opportunity to get in a collar-jerk correction. In watching, they wouldn’t really have understood what they were seeing. But an up-to-date trainer? Whether Leah succeeded or failed, any, absolutely any, contemporary trainer should have taken one look and said, “Oh, binding. Bernie Brown.”

And a professional dog writer, trainer and handler of numerous consistently high-scoring golden retrievers, columnist for
Dog’s Life,
member of the board of the Cambridge Dog Training Club, occasional contributor to
Off
-
Lead,
and every-word-of-every-issue front-to-finish reader of
Front and Finish!
An individual who continued to harbor the intense, if delusional, hope of putting a C.D.X. on an Alaskan malamute? A person who had spent the previous three weeks enduring her cousin’s increasingly irksome proselytizing for the Bernie Brown method? Well, I’d have expected better. I could hardly believe how slow I’d been. I of all people should have spotted it: binding. The no-force method of murder.

29

 By the time Steve arrived, I’d fed the dogs, taken a shower, and put on a black L.L. Bean tank-top dress with a wide jersey belt. Black may not seem like a festive choice for the Fourth of July, and it sure shows dog hair, but the weather was hot, the dress was cool, and, to my way of thinking, L.L. Bean’s closest approximation to the rich and varied shades of Rowdy’s coat was a perfectly patriotic choice. If I’d been Betsy Ross, the American flag would display a head study of an Alaskan malamute against a field of stars and stripes, and our national colors would be red, white, blue, and dark wolf gray.

Steve turned up in a new white polo shirt and tan pants devoid of any particular canine or nationalist associations. Before he’d even entered the kitchen, Rita came pattering down the back stairs carrying a bottle of wine and wearing a red linen dress and red heels so high that it made my feet hurt just to look at them.

“Tah dah!” she announced. “Am I all right? Have I gone too far?

“No,” I said, “not at all. You look wonderful.”

“Fetching,” said Steve, D.V.M. and dog trainer, but not usually punster, at least not intentionally.

“
Fetching
?” Rita was delighted. “What higher compliment?”

Steve still didn’t get it. While Rita explained, I called out, “Leah! Leah, you’re due at the Bensons’ at seven-thirty at the latest. Can you hear me?”

She was in the bathroom, but the shower wasn’t yet running.

“Yes,” she called out.

“Don’t spend an hour on your hair, okay? And don’t bring Kimi. Do you understand? There’ll be food, and she’ll steal everything,
and
there’s a hearing dog in the house. I do
not
want you showing up with her. Is that clear?”

“Okay!” The shower started.

To console Rowdy and Kimi, who were prancing around depositing dog hair on our clothes and begging to go along, I doled out two lams biscuits. Then I took two bottles of wine from the refrigerator, handed them to Steve, and picked up the present I’d wrapped for Ruffly, a squeaker-free polyester fleece toy in the form of a person
—great
toy, by the way, but if your dog chews, watch out for the ones with squeakers, and if you don’t know why, ask your vet, unless, of course, your vet happens to be out of town enjoying a luxury vacation paid for by all those other dog owners who also didn’t know why to watch out for squeaker toys until their dogs ended up in surgery and their vets ended up in Barbados. Got it?

Steve’s van was parked in my driveway, and although Highland Street was only a few blocks away, I wanted to take it to Stephanie’s. I hate hot weather. But Steve argued that it was a beautiful evening, and Rita agreed with him. Popping firecrackers volleyed like gun. shots, and the heat, humidity, and air pollution had turned the evening sky a glowing orange-red that reminded me of an oil refinery fire I’d once witnessed on the outskirts of Philadelphia. Instead of whining about the heat and bragging about my privileged childhood on the cold Atlantic coast, I said that it certainly smelled and sounded like the Fourth of July, and it did, too, but I regretted my words as soon as I’d spoken. Mentioning the charcoal briquettes, lighter fluid, and charred chicken skin was fine, but the rat-a-tat-tat of the cherry bombs must have drilled through Rita’s aids and into her ears like a sadistic dentist drilling into the unanesthetized nerve of an abscessed molar.