Abnormal Occurrences (16 page)

...Appropriately enough, it was on TV that the nation saw the first indication that the whole thing was coming to an end.

One Saturday afternoon, in March of that year, a ninety-eight-year-old boxer won by knockout a televised bout against an opponent of seventy-four. By now this result would have been utterly routine, the older having been, as usual, the favorite by overwhelming odds. But when the referee raised the victor’s arm in triumph, the latter announced in a strident voice that she was 100 percent woman. Afterwards, a group of female reporters emerged from the locker rooms and confirmed the fact as stated.

Trend-spotters, determined not to be caught napping again, quickly identified a change of era, but only time would tell how long the next one would endure.

O
WING TO HIS SUPERIOR
sensibility, Vernon Bowers had no friends left by the time he had graduated from high school. Other people simply could not endure long association with someone who could see and identify the illusions by which they were habitually duped; the fraudulent causes they supported, the talentless performers they adored, the mendacious leaders they followed. He did not spare himself: he knew it was his weakness that he could not play along in silence with hoaxes on every hand, he who was a slave to truth. He could not forbear from saying to the proud owner of a new car, “I guess you haven’t seen the results of the latest crash tests—?” Or to a female cousin, “I wonder if that low-carb diet is living up to your expectations—?” Or of a contemporary’s latest haircut, “Really?”

He was even more outspoken with his parents, under whose roof he continued to live for three years after college, rent-free, for, lacking in employment, he had no income to speak of. The jobs he had been offered were too stupid to take seriously. As to women, there actually existed a few who were initially attracted to him by what they assumed was an attention-getting gimmick that at least made him stand out from the usual herd of stiffs they had to choose from, but it seldom took more than one date to prove that Vernon had no alternative act; he was an a-hole to the core of his being. “
Why
do you wear
those
shoes?” “
That’s
your brother?” “I never heard of that school.” And so on. Not to mention that when sooner or later told to go eff himself he seemed to take it as a well-earned reward.

At home he complained about his mother’s cuisine and his father’s grammar, pointing out that Italians never put grated cheese on sea-food pasta and that “Joe couldn’t help but run into her” is barbarous, the correct usage being either, “could not but...” or “couldn’t help running...” His parents not only put up with this sort of thing but were proud of their only offspring, whom his mother had produced when she was older than most of those in first pregnancies. Also, neither Mom nor Dad had ever spent a day of higher education, whereas Vernon had a full two years at the community college that was near enough to commute to and knew a lot more about the great world than they did, his father being a plasterer and his mother still a part-time manicurist, earning a combined income that was enough to feed him and even dispense pocket money.

Nevertheless Vernon was not happy to be an eternal dependent. His folks would die one day, leaving not a whole lot after years of the big spending to which they were addicted: two cars, plasma TV, and his mother was a shoe freak, with a closetful. So eventually he had to do something that paid generously and demanded little, because though he was capable of vast achievements, experience had taught him to expect that envious others would block any effort conspicuous for its ambition. What he wished for was that one big break.

He got it in an unexpected way. In a dinner-table discussion of why, with all he had to offer his fellow men and women, Vernon spent little time with any of them, his father concluded, “Well, I was watching C-SPAN the other night, and some professor said, ‘According to Harry Truman’—you know who he was, Vernon, I’m sure.”

His son nodded impatiently. “President who lost the Vietnam War because he refused to use the atomic bomb.”

“So what the professor says was, ‘If you want a friend in Washington, DC, get yourself a dog.’”

As it was pro forma for Vernon to disparage everything his parents said, and for them to admire him all the more for it, he did so now, but the Truman doctrine made its mark on him and when enough time had elapsed for the matter to have been forgotten by the senior Bowers, who could however recite the batting orders of baseball teams from three decades earlier, Vernon bought a dachshund with his father’s Discovery card and took it home for his mother to feed and house.

She of course was flattered to receive the assignment. “And what do you want to call him, Vernie?” she asked, accepting the puppy, about the size of a plump squirrel, in her arms. “How about—”

Vernon snorted. “Certainly not. I would feel like a fool every time I called it.” He deliberated for a moment while the puppy, which had welcomed the initial embrace, now had become blasé and struggled to go elsewhere.

Mrs. Bowers lowered the dog to the floor and simpered as it scurried through the doorway between kitchen and dining room. “I don’t suppose the little thing can be housebroken as yet.”

“That’s your problem,” said Vernon, who hated to have to apply his fine mind to a practical particular as opposed to meditating on universal abstractions, and he resented the new pet for putting him on the spot this way.

Mrs. Bowers, who had followed the puppy out of the kitchen, now popped her head back into the doorway to note, “Little so-and-so did some business on the dining-room carpet, but just peepee.” She left for a second, then reappeared. “Oops, spoke too soon.”

While she was collecting cleanup equipment, the puppy ambled back into the kitchen, where, bending to show arched eyebrows and pursed lips, Vernon asked, “Did you make poopoo?”

To which his new pet answered, “Sure.”

Vernon’s expression changed completely. “
What
?” His mother returned at that point, and to her he said, “I swear that dog just spoke to me.”

She acknowledged the remarkable news by gesturing with a dustpan.

“I swear,” Vernon repeated, and to the puppy he said, “Speak!”

But the doggy had lost such interest as it had ever had in the matter and was sniffing at the point at which the refrigerator abutted the wall.

“He smells that mouse I saw run in there last winter,” said Mrs. Bowers.

“Now, Mom,” Vernon, said, “please try to keep your mind on this. That dog can talk. Do you realize the moneymaking potential?” He squatted. “Here, boy! C’mere, puppy.” Numerous repetitions of the summons finally succeeded in luring the little dachshund to wriggle to his vicinity if not quite within reach. “Say something!” Vernon implored. “Show how you can talk...At least say ‘sure’ again.”

On the point of turning away at the conclusion of its brief attention span, the puppy hesitated and said, quite clearly, “Okay.”

Vernon recognized immediately that while “sure” might resemble some natural sound that a dog was capable of uttering, “okay,” with its two pure vowels and one of the sharpest of consonants, did not come close to any variation of bark, growl, howl, whine, or yelp.

“There you go!” Vernon exulted. But when he looked for his mother’s reaction, he saw that once again she had left the room, and when she returned with a dustpan load of excrement, it was at the trot toward the ground-floor lavatory, nose wrinkled, face averted from her burden: scarcely the time to bring her to a halt.

The experience was representative of the subsequent occasions on which Vernon sought to demonstrate to his parents the dog’s powers of speech: either they were out of earshot of, if present, the animal would not say a word. And if he had had friends for this or any other use, he would not have bought the puppy in the first place.
So here I am
, he said in his internal monologue,
with the big break I have been looking for, but there’s a hitch in it, so it’s useless. How can I make a buck out of a talking dog if nobody but me ever hears it?

As it turned out, the little Dackel could not only speak but could read Vernon’s mind. Hearing the foregoing in (presumably) its inner ear, the puppy looked up at its master and said, “Teevee.”

“What channel?” Vernon asked, but the dog spoke nothing further at the moment, which was its way: provide only a cogent word or very short phrase at any given time, make of it what you would, it was only a puppy, not a windbag demagogue. Vernon had come to terms with that situation. He turned on the television and began to surf, and in no time at all he found a daytime talk show to which a young woman had brought a cocker spaniel which theoretically could sing “Happy Birthday,” snatches of classic Broadway show tunes, and the first word of the drinking song from
La Traviata
.

The host, Skeeter Wales, whom some older viewers might recognize from his earlier career as the lead juvenile in a long since cancelled sitcom, was telling the audience, “...no guarantees, folks. As you know if you been watchin’ us for a while, we give these animals a shot, and they’ll talk up a storm in auditions and rehearsals and while waitin’ in the green room to come on, but once they get in front of the cameras they clam up. What the hey, no harm done maybe, but it would be nice if one of them came through... Now today we have Sophie Van Meter of Provo, Utah, and her dog Wendy...”

The cocker spaniel failed to sing a note, responding to its mistress’s wheedlings, admonitions, and edible treats with a series of stock canine expressions—the big-eyed optimist, the tail-wagging team player, and the show of tongue that anthropomorphizing pet owners see as a grin—and utter silence. Host Wales elevated genial shoulders, saying, “Dayjaw view all over again! Too bad, Sophie, thanks a lot, and you too, Wendy.”

As woman and dog pranced off, seemingly as proud as if they had triumphed, Wales looked into the camera. “Offer still stands. Anybody got a dog can say a recognizable word or sing any part of a well-known melody
on the air
, we’ll put you on. Get in touch with us on the website,
Skeeterdotcom
.”

Damn!
Vernon reflected.
That would be the perfect opportunity, but I can’t even get this dog to talk in front of my folks.

He was unaware that the puppy had returned to the living room from the kitchen, where Vernon’s mother was trying unsuccessfully to paper-train it, distributing pages of the local weekly across the vinyl tiles, but the animal was careful always to pee in the narrow gaps between the sheets. She would also take it into the backyard at times, but the little thing was still too young to understand what, other than chase insects, it was supposed to do in fresh air and on grass.

At his feet, the dog responded again to its master’s thoughts, saying, “Fine.”

“You mean you’ll be fine on Skeeter Wales’s show? You’ll really say something?”

“Sure,” said the puppy, playfully pawing at Vernon’s shoelaces.

Vernon realized he would be undertaking an enormous risk to his amour-propre if the dog failed to deliver; he might make a fool of himself on coast-to-coast television, which would be just what all those jerks he had disdained in school and college would be waiting for. Nevertheless he took the plunge.

The dog, at last given a name, one of audience-appealing potential, proved a hit, a smash, a blockbuster, beginning with Skeeter Wales’s introduction, “Folks, let’s have a big welcome for Vernon Bowers and little Sausage,” and the first appearance of that rust-colored furry tube mounted on four short, quick-striding legs; no one could keep a straight face. But when Sausage clearly enunciated, “Hi, Skeeter!” the consequent din set a record for decibels and duration.

Wales leered into the camera. “Lemme say this, folks: you are witnessing something historical.”

For comic effect, Vernon had led the dachshund onstage with a leash, but raised the little animal in his arms while it spoke. Now, neglecting nothing to exploit his big break, he volunteered to let Wales hold Sausage while he, its owner, left the set. “Proving,” he said to the camera, with an aplomb that seemed to reflect a professionalism of many years, “I’m not a ventriloquist!”

“Hey,” yelped Skeeter, “good call! I never thought of that.”

While Vernon was in the wings, watching a monitor, Wales, his big bland pale human face against Sausage’s sleek head with its beady bright eyes and glistening black-tipped snout, asked the dog, “Who’s your daddy?”

“Vernon,” said Sausage.

Show-biz offers began to pour in even before the Wales show signed off, and Vernon soon contracted with an agent who specialized in animal performers, a business manager, a press agent, and a team of trainers whose job it was to keep the dog in tiptop shape through exercise and diet, of which the former was okay with Sausage because workouts could be caninely considered as games, but the little fellow was not too keen on being fed kibble that had been formulated in the interests of nutrition and not flavor. While it generally reserved its powers of speech for public performances, rarely even addressing Vernon in private, Sausage did voice terse complaints at mealtime (now, to add insult to injury, scheduled but once a day), e.g., “Bad!” followed by spitting a morsel on the floor beside the dish; “Lousy!”; “No!” amusing those in his entourage, not including Vernon, who was usually distracted by the realization of his formerly idle dreams of avarice: Sausage was signed to star in a primetime sitcom, with a spinoff movie to be shot when the TV show was on hiatus, and the dog-food commercial campaign, in which the pooch himself pronounced the name of the product, was to kick off during the first commercial break of the Superbowl telecast.

“Notice,” observed one of the team of trainers to the colleague who usually attended Sausage on the treadmill sessions, “he doesn’t call it ‘garbage’ or ‘crap’.”

“Because dogs
like
garbage and shit, right?”

“You got it.”

But all concerned were soon to learn that the dachshund, who was growing like gangbusters and within no time at all was the equivalent of a teenager in human terms and was similarly willful, would not tolerate being taken lightly. With its keen ear for any speech in its vicinity, Sausage had acquired quite a vocabulary of foul invectives, and its testiness found expression in nonlinguistic ways as well: urinating in places that would serve to make a point, among them various human ankles; leaving turds in conspicuous situations; and, ever more frequently, nipping persons with the robust adult teeth that had replaced the stinging needles of puppyhood, choppers that could do real damage. Though thus far the animal restrained itself from the kind of biting that might maim, those that had to deal with the problem were wary. The dog provided their income; they were expendable, as Sausage was not.