A Hell of a Dog (11 page)

“How tragic,” Cathy said. For a moment I was confused. I thought she must be talking about Rick's consultation advice. But she wasn't looking at the stage. It was apparently Martyn's plight she found so tragic.

Tragic? Maybe we were listening to different conversations. All I heard was a guy trying to get laid.

It was working, too. You could have fried eggs on the look that passed between them.

Cathy leaned close and whispered something I couldn't hear.

“Do you think so?” Martyn said, apparently astonished by whatever he'd heard.

Where were the Oscars when they were so richly deserved?

“I do,” she said.

I leaned back. Sitting that close to them, I was in danger of getting diabetes.

“We all so hate to punish our doggies,” Rick was saying.

Talk about diabetes.

“So what might you do about the dog who loves the sound of his own voice too much when he's put out in the yard? Well, to be honest, you can help these behaviors disappear without giving a single correction. We behaviorists call this process extinction. When we simply ignore the behavior, its frequency diminishes, and eventually the unwanted behavior disappears altogether.” He smiled out at us. “And this way the dog will not think of you as a punisher.”

I heard applause. Dashiell lifted his head, but Freud did not. Then Beryl was on the stage, and hands were up all over the room. Beryl pointed to the owner of one of them.

“Why the great divide in dog training?” a young man in a green T-shirt asked. He must have been one of those rude New Yorkers you hear so much about, going right to the heart of the matter with no polite small talk to cushion the thrust of his question. “Why don't the trainers who use food get along with—”

Rick leaned toward one of the mikes, but he was too slow.

“Because, dear man, some of us find it devastating to have the public taught that dogs are nothing but furry little garbage disposals rather than sentient, thinking beings.”

Half the audience laughed. The other half started grumbling.

“And much as I detest having to disagree with my esteemed colleague, it is imperative that I point out to you professionals that barking is self-reinforcing, even at those times when it hasn't just chased the postal person away. You cannot extinguish it by not reinforcing it, because the act itself gives the dog immense pleasure. You, my dear friends, are beside the point. The same, of course, is true with chewing problems. You can extinguish some bad habits by doing nothing. But why not do something? Why not take an active role in your dog's education? ‘No' is not a four-letter word, people. It's merely one of the ways you can communicate annoyance, displeasure, or impending danger to your companion animal.”

Rick leaned toward his mike again, but clearly Beryl had no intention of relinquishing the floor.

“Moreover, you cannot discuss these issues logically, though heaven knows, that's what people think they are doing. Instead, they are working off unconscious emotional needs set in childhood, using the dog to rewrite history, so that the owner with the cold parent becomes the indulgent good parent to his pet—”

Cathy got up. I slid down in my seat and tried to look as if I were completely absorbed in the Q & A session.

“So that they are both the parent and the child in this scenario, indulging and being indulged, the way we may be all the characters in our dreams.” She turned to Rick, finally giving him a chance to respond. But it was too late. He looked shell-shocked. Beryl had just given him a powerful demonstration of the effectiveness of negative reinforcement as well as the principle of alpha.

Beryl shrugged and pointed to a young woman whose hand had been waving frantically in the air all the while Beryl had been speaking.

“Is there any breed that's truly hypoallergenic?” she asked.

As Rick began to respond, Martyn gathered up his things and quietly headed for the door. He looked lost in thought and didn't seem to notice me.

“I've been reading about drive training,” a man in the middle of the group was saying. There was something pinched and tight about him. Looking at the back of his head, I imagined his lips would be pursed. Perhaps it was the perfect little voice that put me off, the way he enunciated every syllable so carefully. As he continued, I realized he was speaking too slowly, even for a mid-westerner.

“Could each of you explain how a dog's drives can be used when obedience-training a client's pet dog?” he said, reminding me that Ida once said that talking very slowly can be a passiveaggressive act, a way to hold someone's attention without earning that right The result, she'd said, made the listener intensely irritated. It worked for me. I felt like slapping him.

“How using the dog's desire to fetch,” he droned on, “could be a pathway to training, for example, or—”

“Clever trainers have always motivated dogs by capitalizing on what the animal finds exciting, dear,” Beryl interrupted. “Do you have a dog with you?”

He was slim and narrow-shouldered, even smaller looking when he stood than he'd appeared seated. A handsome, lively flat-coat trotted along as he walked toward the stage.

“Show us his recall, dear.”

The precise little man, every hair glued in place, his tie just so, left his handsome boy on a sit-stay and crossed the stage. He turned, took a few hundred breaths, passed a few birthdays, and applied for social security. Then, snapping his fingers, he said, “Watch me, Dicky. Dicky, come.”

Dicky walked slowly toward his owner and sat, as precise and dutiful as his master, clearly as bored as we were.

“Now let me try,” Beryl said, reaching into the pocket of her navy blazer and pulling out a tennis ball. Instead of placing Dicky on a stay or commanding his attention, Beryl bounced the ball, scooping it out of the air with a smooth, practiced move, the way the dog might have were he close enough.

When Dicky turned in her direction, it was as if he were the Christmas tree in Rockefeller Center, and someone had just thrown the switch.

“Dicky, dear,” she said in an animated voice, “come to Beryl,” and with no further encouragement, Dicky flew across the stage and sat in front of a complete stranger, gazing into her eyes as if she were the Messiah, for indeed, to Dicky, that's exactly who she had just become.

“Good lad.”

She tossed the ball to Dicky, who rose and caught it to a round of applause.

“There, dear, does that answer your question?”

The little man nodded and left the stage, Dicky still holding the ball in his mouth.

“Just a little thought about who the dog is, and you can enliven his response and keep his mind on the work at hand.”

Rick, standing still on the stage, began to look as if he were smoldering. Were I closer, I might be able to see his aura, red as the rage he was trying to control as Beryl eclipsed him with her quick, confident answers.

I remembered reading a story that the psychic Edgar Cayce told. A friend of his had once been waiting for an elevator, and when it arrived and the door opened, no one aboard had an aura. She let the elevator go and took the stairs instead. When she'd reached the lobby, she found that one of the cables had snapped, and the elevator had fallen, killing everyone inside.

I'd always wondered why she hadn't warned them. Was it part of her belief, and Cayce's, that the man who is destined to drown will drown in a glass of water? Did they think there was nothing one could or should do, that the people on the elevator were all fated to die, like strangers who share the same terrible lot in airline crashes or train wrecks?

Just because you see what's coming doesn't mean you can interfere, does it?

I thought about Alan Cooper then, and the way he'd died. Could anyone have prevented that accident, or was it
bashert?
What a burden it must be to see the future if, no matter how well-meaning you are, you can't do a damn thing about what you see.

11

HOME OF THE BRAVES

The mood at dinner was almost manic, people shouting across the table at each other instead of chatting sedately with the person to their left or right. They gesticulated, too, as if everyone were on uppers, celebrating some great victory we'd all worked so hard to achieve rather than grieving over the loss of a young friend who had died that very morning.

For one thing, no one had considered Alan a friend—with one possible exception, I thought, glancing over at Sam. Perhaps our evening was merely a wake instead of a funeral. Surely we were drinking as if it were. Or maybe it was just the escape from reality we all needed. No one was anxious to retire and be alone with his or her own thoughts. It seemed the consensus of unspoken opinion was that we should do whatever was necessary to delay that eventuality for as long as possible. After all, what had happened to Alan Cooper could just as easily have happened to any of us.

Months back there had been a little piece in the
Times
reporting the recall of some eight thousand hair dryers because they posed the risk of electrocution if dropped in water when they were plugged in, even if they were turned off at the time. I remembered the piece because until that time, I'd always thought an appliance had to be on, its juice flowing, to pose any risk.

Juices were certainly flowing when the dessert was served. There were so many of us talking at once, so much loud laughter, that I don't even remember for sure who did the first trick. As I recall, pickled as I was on vodka, drunk (in every sense of the word) the way Boris suggested, ice cold, neat, and not sipped but swallowed a shot at a time, it was Tracy. She put a piece of peach pie, just a mouthful, on Jeff's nose, held up a finger for him to wait, and then told him Okay. We all watched while he flipped the morsel high in the air and then caught it in his mouth. When we applauded, most of the dogs began to bark. With that, Audrey led a group howl, dogs and trainers, all of us tilting our heads up toward the ornate molding that circled the chandelier and making mournful sounds. I remember thinking of Alan then, the sadness making my chest feel heavy.

I think I made the first toast. It's hard to be sure. There were so many. But I remember thinking even as I held my glass aloft, saying, “To Alan,” that I'd already had too much to drink. And I think I put my shot glass down without drinking. At least that time.

Bucky's toast was next. He asked us each to make a silent prayer, but the mood had been set, and it was far too late in the game for us to be serious twice in a row. “To Alan,” he'd said, but Boris couldn't let well enough alone.

“To Alan,” he'd seconded, holding his glass high, dipping his head for drama, then, looking back up so as not to miss our reactions, he added, “electrocutioner to the stars.”

That gave Bucky the silence he'd been after. After a moment, to break the somber mood, he put Angelo up on the table and signaled him to stand on his hind legs and dance in a circle. Then Bucky stood and tapped his chest, and Angelo touched his front paws down, then launched himself forward, landing in Bucky's arms. We all applauded, and those who could whistled, which got Sky up. He ran to the opposite side of the table, took the perfect balance point, crouched, and waited, as if we were sheep he needed to move as soon as his mistress gave him leave to do so. We all turned to look at Cathy to see what she'd do next; obviously, even if any of us were ovine enough to let the small dog move us toward her in other circumstances, there wasn't one of us sober enough to have gotten up just then without tipping over.

Cathy whistled twice, tilting her head to her left, which sent Sky moving to his right. Going from person to person, sticking his long, thin nose where it didn't belong, Sky began to pick our pockets. Each time he found a set of keys, he'd snag them, continue around the table to Cathy, toss them onto her lap, and then go back to his search. When he came to me, I could feel his cold nose through the lining of my jacket pocket. Next I felt his teeth as he grasped the key tag and slipped the key out.

Cathy, flushing slightly as she did so easily, despite her California tan, just watched him work, offering neither encouragement nor redirection. In the end, he'd picked six pockets, and Cathy scooped up six hotel keys from her lap and tossed them onto the table. The applause was wild, and those of us who could manage it gave her a standing ovation.

“Untie,” Audrey said, putting Magic down onto the rug.

The black pug started with Martyn, who sat at Audrey's left, because we were sitting in exactly the same places we'd sat the night before, except that there were twelve of us now instead of thirteen. When we heard growling, and when Martyn began to laugh, we all ducked our heads under the table to have a look-see. There was Magic holding the end of one lace and shaking her head from side to side, backing up as she did, keeping up her ferocious sound. When she'd untied one shoe, she proceeded to the next and then around the table, until everyone not wearing slip-ons had their laces dangling loose. We all stayed with our heads under the table, too enthralled to miss a shoe.

Woody picked up a little basket of chocolate mints that the waiter had placed on the table after clearing the dessert plates. For a moment the basket disappeared, then Rhonda came around serving the mints, the handle of the basket tucked into her big undershot jaw, the basket swinging below her pugnacious-looking chin.

We took mints by the handfuls, junking up on sugar and chocolate as the perfect accompaniment to the booze. As Rhonda worked her way around the table, we got louder and louder.

When someone's cell phone rang, it set us off anew. I sent Dash to fetch it, and he slipped it off Woody's belt and brought it to me. I held it up as if to answer the call, pretended to listen, and then said, “Only a smile. What are
you
wearing?” When it rang again, I passed it to Woody.

Rick surprised us all by asking Freud how old Sam was, and after he'd barked about ten times and showed no signs of stopping, the saliva flying out of both sides of his mouth, Sam jumped up and grabbed his big, drooly mouth to stop the count. Whoever would have guessed that Rick Shelbert had a sense of humor? You never know.