Sleeps with Dogs (27 page)

I
had a five-day-a-week walk that was a quick commute by freeway, the client paid promptly, and they rarely if ever canceled. Sure, their Christmas tip had been Starbucks peppermint hot chocolate, but their patronage was critical to keeping a roof over my head and the lights turned on.

They lived in the Piedmont hills in a beautiful two-story Craftsman atop a long flight of flagstone steps. Frank and Diane were the prototypical rail-thin man and fleshier woman. Her struggle with weight was allegedly due to a terrible car accident that left her with irreparable back damage, a cane, and an array of painkillers. Frank had a medicated glaze to him that was probably due to some prescription of his own. They had a daughter, Mia, for whom the dog was likely meant to be a companion. I suspected it was she who had been allowed to name the dog.

Tickles was a darling Tibetan terrier. She had inquisitive eyes, was quick to reward human company with a wag and a lick, and
warmed to me immediately. With the wife's back problems, regular dog walks (and apparently even getting up and down the stairs to the house) was becoming an impossibility, and the husband worked a full-time job outside of the house. Occasionally, he'd be home for one reason or another when I arrived, happening across him in the foyer or coming down the stairs looking rheumy-eyed and unsteady. I tried to be as brief and noncommittal with my greetings as possible and just get in and out and on my way with Tickles. His vacant stare gave me goose bumps.

Tickles had a dog run in the back of the house, kind of a glorified gutter where she could eat, drink, piss, shit, and work on the peanut butter kong that was thrown to her every morning after the humans had their breakfast. It was no wonder that our walks were not only the high point of her days, but that on the street she was barely manageable. She was tiny but still arguably a menace to any other canine (or cat or squirrel-like creature) that crossed her path. It was my job to exercise her to the point of exhaustion while training her to behave on-leash and learn how to control her aggression in the presence of other animals. I found that, in the six months or so that I walked her, Monday through Friday, between the hours of eleven and two, I failed on all counts.

I tried to teach her how to walk at a heel and not pull, and, when she caught a whiff of dog, to focus on me and maintain a sit, without flying into a whirling, snarling, slavering rage. It was somewhat comical to observe dogs three or eleven times her size reacting to her fits. Most of them were well mannered and responded with the canine equivalent of raised eyebrows and a discreet crossing-the-street avoidance. The owners often regarded me with some mixture of pity, distaste, or annoyance as though I had prompted her to act like such a maniac. “She's not mine,” I wanted to call to them as they sauntered smugly away with their
impeccably behaved companions. Cute as she was, her on-leash antics were downright embarrassing.

In spite of her dreadful behavior on our walks, I really loved Tickles one-on-one, and she was one of those rare certainties in my job. Monday through Friday, steady money, a regular check at the end of every month. This could not be more appreciated. I needed that little dog. And, it seemed, she needed me too. The little girl wasn't old enough to take her out alone, and it didn't look like Tickles was going to get much attention or exercise on the parents' time.

In concert with Tickles's regular visits, I'd been granted a brief reprieve from penny-pinching thanks to an extended pet-sitting gig for a cranky and extremely aged dachshund. It was a tricky job, requiring twice-daily visits at the very tippy top of one of Berkeley's many hills, reachable only by a single twisty road. So remote was this house that it was the penultimate mailbox from the end of the road, where the concrete ended in some overgrowth and forced the driver to make a three-point turn and return the way he or she came.

This was the very first job that I invited Patrick along for, an opportunity for him to experience my work in person. I was so excited to drive up into the hills with him, right along the Oakland/ Berkeley border, and take in the view from the top together. Up, up we went, on the curving roads fraught with hairpin turns and no guardrails, no street lamps, and barely enough room for cars going in the opposite direction to squeeze by. The houses we passed were mostly the type with the unassuming garage up top at street level, belying the sprawling houses set into the hillside below.

The view of the bay and the city of San Francisco from the client's front yard was unobstructed, the bridge looking like something from a child's erector set, and all the houses in between were
little spots of life and light on a canvas. It looked unreal from so high up and left me feeling exhilarated by the height and scope of the perspective. This euphoria was quickly extinguished, though, when I turned my attentions to the yard and house itself, and the dog lurking within.

The front yard was a mystery to me, with wild, unrestrained plants, some dying and some overgrown into impenetrable thickets, accented by a rusting lawn chair or dulled, scratched garden globes. The front porch was cluttered with birdhouses, galoshes, assorted shovels, and countless cobwebby pots. It seemed to be perpetually gray and damp there. Despite the unblemished view from the edge of the property, the lot itself was heavily shaded by trees with low-hanging branches that made everything feel vaguely oppressive.

When we arrived for that first visit together, Patrick was quiet as I opened the heavy front door. He knew this client only as the reason I'd stolen away so early on recent mornings. I'd lean over him and rub his back, telling him I had to go, and he always grunted in response, claiming later that he'd never heard me and woke up thinking I'd snuck out on him.

The notion that I'd want to get away in favor of an old dachshund in an even older house made me smile inwardly. How desperately I hadn't wanted to leave his side, even if it weren't for this vicious little beast of an animal. I'd awake knowing that I was already late and she'd have made a mess somewhere in the house for me to clean up.

But this being a weekend, Patrick could come meet the reason for my hasty early morning departures. He had a softness for dachshunds, having grown up with them. There was Princess, their first, followed thereafter by Princess Two. This is beyond me, calling successive dogs by the same name. We were so gutted by the death
of Biscuit that we couldn't bear to ever have another dog; we had to switch species entirely, moving on to our cat, Seal. (She was a biter, too—the only biter I ever loved.) To have a second dog, and one named Biscuit Two, would have been unthinkable.

We entered. Sure enough, I could smell that she'd done it again. She was always hiding among the clutter when I arrived, in one of a few places: under the back corner of the massive oak table in the center of the room, or beneath the lamp table that I had to reach in order to have any light. I hoped every time, as I made my way carefully toward that lamp, that I didn't step in a pile or a puddle of her mess, and I wondered for the umpteenth time why these people didn't install a light switch—or at least plug in another lamp—next to the front door.

I told Patrick to wait for me by the front door, and I got to the lamp without incident. I turned the switch, and Bitsy was revealed, snarling up at me. She was a sixteen-year-old dachshund, purebred, her show name something absurd like Countess Beatrice von Fluffington IX, which I heard once and dismissed straightaway. Her owner called her Bitsy for short, which worked for me.

I couldn't walk her until I located and cleaned up her mess, or messes. This was a trick, considering the living room was carpeted in a fraying, elaborately patterned rug, with flourishes and arabesques that perfectly masked a urine stain or a pile of dog shit. Luckily, this time she had soiled the hallway, which led to the downstairs bathroom. The planks were honey wood and contrasted helpfully with the pile of poop upon them. By this time, Patrick had ventured into the living room.

“Oh my god, what a mess,” he said softly, taking in the piles of books and papers that covered every surface. “Are they hoarders?”

“I have no idea. I try not to look too hard at what all is here and
just focus on getting in and out without too much trouble,” I said, as I leaned over with my mitt of paper towels, wrapped four-layers thick around my hand. I grabbed her little goat-pellets of poop and shoved them in a Safeway bag, spraying down the site with Trader Joe's all-purpose cleanser. I'd started to associate the pungent sage scent of the spray with this hellish job and stopped using it at my own house for its negative connotation.

With the shit all cleaned up, I started the dance of hooking Bitsy up to her leash. Holding a biscuit in front of her with one hand, I poised the leash clip with the other. She caught the scent of the treat, and, just as she was about to lunge at my biscuit hand with her sharp little teeth, I dropped it in front of her and attached the leash clip to the loop on her collar.

When I was successful, she'd fiercely gobble her treat before she realized she'd been hooked up to the leash, and I could get my hands well away from her mouth. But it didn't always go so smoothly, and she'd clamp her mean little jaws around the fingers offering the treat, or else see my other hand in her peripheral vision and snap her angular head around to chomp down on that hand instead.

I hated biters. I couldn't help but radiate anxiety when working with them, and I knew she could sense the tension coming off me. When I initially met with her owner for our consult, she'd laughed about Bitsy's biting and her boyfriend's indignation at being on the receiving end of so many painful nips. “She just prefers me,” she had said airily. I realized later—too late—that Bitsy had been so well-behaved on that visit because the owner was there. But with Mommy gone, all manners and any semblance of good behavior flew right out the window. I was comforted, however, to know that I wasn't the only one she was biting. That poor, poor boyfriend.

I prompted Bitsy toward the front door and, placated by the treat, she followed. I led the way out onto the porch, down the
steps, and into the snarl of a garden. I waited as long as it took for her to do her business, either in the garden or on the street. It was a certainty that if she didn't do it in my presence, she'd do it in the house before I returned for the next visit. In the evenings, the house was pitch-black inside, and I ran a greater risk of putting my foot in it. Today she waited until we were out on the street in the sodden leaves by the side of the road to squat, piss, trundle a few steps, shit, and then kick, kick, kick her stumpy legs in an effort to cover it up. Did she kick inside the house as well when she shat on the rug? I wondered. Were there pellets lurking feet from the scene of the crime that I had yet to discover, propelled by a well-placed kick from her sharp little paw?

Back in the house, I still needed to feed Bitsy, which was another dangerous endeavor. She was fiercely food reactive, and, as soon as her bowl was filled, I could not even be in the room or she would snarl menacingly, even going so far as lunging at me at with her teeth bared. I demonstrated this for Patrick's benefit, and he let out a short bark of disbelief.

“Let's just go,” I said. I had screwed up and fed her before refilling her water bowl, but getting near that bowl was never going to happen now unless I waited until she was done eating. Even if I used my foot to maneuver the water bowl far enough away from her to pick it up, she would bite at my shoes until I surrendered and backed away. Crazy beast. She had enough water remaining in her bowl that I could wait to refill it when I returned.

“Ready?” I asked. He nodded, a bemused look on his face.

I went back to turn off the light.

“Why don't you just leave it on? Then you don't have to stumble around in the dark tonight,” he said.

I chuckled to myself. “Client's orders,” I said. “They like to save energy.”

“And you honor that? At the risk of walking into furniture or stepping in dog shit?”

I shrugged. It hadn't occurred to me not to honor it. I said I would, so I did. My comfort and the convenience or practicality of the clients' requests weren't really factored; they asked, and I acted accordingly. “Well, yeah. I mean, what if they found out that I left it on?”

“Yeah, what if they did? Are they gonna fire you? From never coming here to clean up shit and get bitten by their dog?”

“Maybe!”

“And would that be so bad?” He looked back into the kitchen in Bitsy's direction and, seeming to know she was being derided, she bared her teeth right back.

I hesitated with my hand on the switch.

“No, actually that would be the best-case scenario.”

So many things could go wrong with the animals or their owners' houses that were entirely out of my control; I didn't see the need to tempt fate by intentionally going against orders. Even if I reviled the mean little mongrel I was charged with watching, or I thought the clients themselves were rude or unreasonable, I had zero desire to be found in the wrong in any way at all. Or worse, to be responsible for some greater catastrophe that could have been avoided had I followed all instructions to the letter.

Many months prior, I'd taken on a cat-sitting client—not one with great long-term promise, as their regular pet sitter was unavailable and I was effectively a sub. They had seven cats, a mix of indoor only, indoor/outdoor, and exclusively outdoor. I took extensive notes on which cats were equipped with the special magnetic collar that triggered the raccoon-proof cat door, minding when they usually came inside and where their food bowls were so I could keep track of whether they'd returned and eaten throughout the week.
At my introduction, I didn't actually lay eyes on all seven cats, as some were off gallivanting in the great outdoors. But I had physical descriptions and names to go by, and the owners felt confident I'd have no problems keeping track.