Little Boy Blue (13 page)

Barthelemy told me that sometimes, especially in places like Person County—where, according to the 2010 Census, only about fourteen percent of people hold a bachelor’s degree— follow-up instructions after medical procedures can get unintentionally lost in translation. Health literacy is different than general literacy, and it is something that many people find challenging. According to the nonprofit Institute of Medicine, some 90 million Americans have problems with health literacy. The National Network Libraries of Medicine says some of the most vulnerable people can include those with high school diplomas who actually read at a seventh- or eighth-grade level. POP-NC sometimes sees these difficulties in follow-up care. As an example, the team recently learned that some of its clients were squirting oral medications onto the scars left from spay/neuter surgeries because they couldn’t understand the instructions to give the medicine by mouth. In the same vein, Barthelemy said, somebody from POP-NC may have told Turner to bleach her sheets if Blue had been on them and was later diagnosed with ringworm, but nobody would have told her that’s what he had just by looking at his skin. And certainly, nobody would have told her to put bleach on Blue himself.

But they’ve heard stranger things, she said. Once, a dog arrived at POP-NC for sterilization while covered in third-degree burns. The owner had believed that coating the dog in oil would keep away fleas and ticks. A cigarette butt then went astray, lighting the family pet ablaze.

Hearing Royce and Barthelemy say these things left me believing that they most likely were telling the truth. Later, when I watched the POP-NC team in action, I felt zero doubt.

The veterinarian assistants on duty the day of my visit were Christina Tozeo and Tamara Matheson, both exceptionally wellspoken and professional brunettes in their twenties. Tozeo wants to be a veterinarian herself and was in the process of applying to school. The two of them moved dogs and cats to Royce with the practiced precision of a NASCAR pit crew. Their roles were well defined, and they clearly knew what they were doing, right down to administering the rabies and distemper vaccines that are given for free along with the $20 fix.

Several of the dogs getting surgery that day in the POP-NC mobile clinic were from a rescue group near Chapel Hill whose volunteer was waiting outside to collect the dogs as I left. I watched one dog go into his transport crate willingly and another put up enough of a snarling fight that Tozeo used a restraint pole—firmly, but not cruelly, with the dog’s feet remaining wholly on the ground—to get him inside without anyone getting bitten. Then I watched her go over the discharge papers with the rescue volunteer, just as she or one of her colleagues would have done with Turner when she came to collect Blue.

Tozeo ran down the day’s surgery notes just as my own veterinarian does, explaining that there were no complications and pointing out anything else that Royce noted during the pre-operation exam. She mentioned one or two things, such as a dog whose tooth was cracked so deeply that the root was exposed. “If he’s not eating, then it’s probably because he’s in pain,” she told the volunteer. “The owner should take him to the local veterinarian to get the proper treatment for that problem.”

It was exactly what Royce and Barthelemy had told me would happen, and it was happening right before my eyes.

Which could mean only one thing: There was more to the story about Blue’s life as a foster dog at Turner’s farm. That rash, those scabs—a puzzle not yet solved. I had to go and see where Blue had lived, if only to figure out whatever it was that I was still not being told, despite all the questions I’d already asked.

I was yet again about to be reminded that while all of the so-called bad guys in any story are not always completely bad, neither are the so-called good guys in any story always completely good.

Something Eerie in the Dark

I arranged to meet Annie Turner for dinner at her choice of restaurant in Roxboro, and she selected a place called Clarksville Station. It’s a converted railroad building connected to an old railroad car that I got a lot of time to look around, since Turner was well more than a half hour late. I chatted up one of the owners and talked to the waiters about a recent experience they’d had with a spirit guide. They all believed the railroad car was haunted by the ghosts of dead soldiers whose bodies had been transported in it from a Civil War battlefield. Apparently, these apparitions occasionally show up while the staff is doing prep work and washing dishes in the kitchen.

There didn’t seem to be any spirits around at that moment, though, and neither was there any sign of Turner. I’d called her en route to say I was on time and an hour away, and she’d told me she could be there in five minutes and would see me soon. Now it was long past that hour plus about forty minutes’ worth of ghost stories later, and I was getting worried that she’d been in some kind of an accident. The waitress kept coming over and refilling my glass of sweet tea, so finally I asked her if she happened to know who Turner was.

“Oh, is that who you’re waitin’ on?” the waitress said. “I know her. That’s just Annie. You could be waiting here for hours.”

When Turner finally arrived, I warmly accepted her big, bear hug. She didn’t even say hello. She just walked right up to me with outstretched arms and a broad smile, as if I were her longlost friend. She is an attractive woman, perhaps my age or a few years older, who looks like she might have been a popular cheerleader back in the day. We sat down and ordered from the dinner menu, and I took out my notebook. While we noshed on appetizers, I asked Turner to tell me a little about herself and about how she’d become involved in rescuing dogs like Blue.

Turner was born and raised in Person County. Once upon a time, she said, she worked in a job that let her take care of people who needed all kinds of help. She told me that she liked the job well enough and figured she’d do it forever, but then one day, when she was twenty-five years old, her then-husband hit her square in the face. His punch broke her nose, which was shoved so far back into her head that it created a blood clot in her brain.

She told me that she was blind for a while and lost her depth perception, but her normal vision returned enough that she can once again drive. She still can’t walk along the railroad tracks— she gets dizzy and falls off the ties—but all in all, she figures it could have been worse. She is remarried now and lives off her disability payments, which gives her plenty of time to do rescue work with dogs. While I found her speech and thought patterns a bit jumpy as we moved from topic to topic, her heart remains big and generous, especially to pooches in distress. From the time she was a child, she says, she was always one to get yelled at for bringing home too many strays.

Two or three times during our conversation, when I asked her about her dealings with Ron Shaw and Person County Animal Control, she avoided details but said Shaw has learned not to mess with her over the years. Several times when I asked her for specifics, she referred to the fact that she’s much shorter than he is and said, simply, “Dynamite comes in small packages.”

She told me that she thinks Canine Volunteer Rescue was founded around 1975 because she’s seen a banner celebrating a former president, and that date is written next to the lady’s name. Turner has been with the group since about 1990, which is at least seven years before Shaw took over as director. She says the facility has had problems for as long as she can recall, and that she remembers having to go at one point to the county’s Board of Commissioners to even be let inside to see the dogs.

It all seemed logical enough to me, based on everything I’d learned so far, but something about Turner’s demeanor left me feeling as though I might not be asking all of the right questions. I couldn’t tell what it was for sure, but after years of interviewing people for stories of all kinds, I had a feeling that something was missing.

After we finished dinner, I did what I’d planned to do all along—asked Turner to walk with me to the parking lot and surprised her with a forty-four-pound bag of dog food. It was the biggest one I’d been able to find back home. I figured Blue couldn’t possibly have eaten that much during his short stay with her as a puppy. I wanted to repay her, and then some, for providing him a safe place of refuge.

I then asked Turner if I could visit her home, something I knew was forward but that I felt I had to ask. I wanted to learn more about where Blue had lived. It’s a truly bold request, I know, asking a woman you’ve just met to take you back to her house for a look around. I would have understood if she’d said no, but she could tell by the look in my eyes that I really wanted her to say yes.

Turner hesitated and thought it over before agreeing, and then she told me I could follow her home. She next pointed to her vehicle across the parking lot, and I guess the look of surprise on my face made her feel like she had to provide an explanation. She said she’d recently inherited the luxury truck. It was an interesting sight as the $70,000 vehicle worked its way along the streets of town.

I followed diligently behind, driving right past the animal shelter on Chub Lake Road and then beyond along the beautiful country roads that make this part of North Carolina a place where people want to stay long after they’re old enough to leave. After turning down a few side streets and passing a charming white general store, I was parked in Turner’s driveway. She vanished for a moment and then reemerged in a golf cart, where she asked me to sit beside her so she could drive me down to the house next door.

That’s where she was living when she brought Blue home, and she said that she still owns the property today. It was not at all the farm that I had imagined when I’d heard that word over the telephone, with open fields and crops growing and maybe some hay bales stacked in a barn. Instead, it’s a regular house—the kind that can be found in plenty of neighborhoods all across America. A good-sized yard is around back and off to the right, surrounded by a chain-link fence. “That’s where Blue used to play, with a clear view of the pond,” she told me as a pair of dogs ran barking toward us. She told me they were her dogs, even though she now lived one house over, up the hill. They seemed desperate to get to her for attention, the way Blue does when I come home after being away for even a half hour, but Turner barely even acknowledged them. Nor did she stop the golf cart to get out and go say hello to them. About the same time, I heard barking out behind the vacant house near the pond and asked if those were her dogs as well. “Oh yes,” she said. “There’s some more babies out there, too.”

We continued our golf cart tour by riding around to the left side of the house, which abuts an overgrown field. This, she said, is where she used to take Blue for walks. She must have once again noticed my quizzical look, because without my even asking she felt the need to explain how Blue might have walked through what I was seeing—a stretch of land overgrown with grass nearly as high as my belly and weeds as far as the eye could see. “I kept this all mowed when I lived here,” she told me. “He never did like to pee in that field, though. He liked to go over to the fence on the other side of the house and pee on that while the other dogs were still inside. You know, like he was saying, ‘Ha ha, I’m special. I got out.’”

I turned my head to look back at the fence, and instead saw what looked like a swap meet at best, and a junkyard at worst. A covered area toward the back of the house was littered with old four-wheelers, tools, and various other parts and machines. My first thought was that if this was an area where Blue had ever stepped foot, then he probably needed a tetanus shot. And again, my expression gave me away. Before I even asked about the rusted and wrecked machinery, Turner said, “My son can fix anything. He can take any of those things apart and turn them into something else.”

Next, she drove me in the golf cart around the back of the property and the pond, heading up the hill to the house next door, where she now lives. We stopped to pick a few grapes from her bush—they were so tasty and sweet that I felt like I got an ice cream headache—and as we sat there in the golf cart discussing the merits of fresh fruit, I saw two dogs run up the road in the distance, right into the vacant house’s yard.

“Yeah, they’re my neighbor’s dogs,” she told me. “He has fifteen acres, and he says he doesn’t believe in fences. Or neutering. Those dogs have knocked up the Cocker Spaniel up the road about four times now. I got the lady with the Cocker Spaniel the vouchers for the twenty-dollar fix, but she keeps telling me that she forgot to go cash them in at the mobile vet. Whatever.”

Our tour continued up over the hill behind Turner’s current house, where I heard more barking than I’d heard inside the Person County Animal Control kennel. The golf cart struggled to make it up and over the crest on the dirt path, and once we were there, we got out to walk. I saw at least three large kennels plus a fully fenced-in area, with at least a dozen more dogs yipping and yapping to get our attention. I had never seen so many dogs in one place, except in the kennel I had visited earlier that week. It seemed like an awful lot of dogs for one person to take care of, even with help from a friend or two. Some of the dogs were puppies who had been outside in these pens for at least the hour or two since she’d left to meet me at the restaurant—and Turner didn’t even open the gates to go inside or acknowledge most of them. They yipped and barked and clawed at the fencing, trying desperately to break through.