Paws before dying (14 page)

“Is it cruel? Does it seem that way to people?”

“Okay! Yes. The more I train, the less I use the training collar, and the more I use rewards. Okay. But I get the point: Judge not. If I have to correct a dog, I do, and there are people who’d say I’m cruel. And for all I know, the damned collar was her husband’s idea. Maybe she objected, and they had a fight, and she lost. So now she feels ashamed. Probably she hates it. Or she doesn’t know what else to do. Probably she’s doing the best she can.”

“Most people are,” Rita said.

Among the people doing the best they could was Jack Engle-man, who called me the next morning to ask me to stop in because he wanted some advice. I am not St. Paul, and there are a lot of kind people out there besides me. And, oh, yes. I am not always kind. But the fact is that Jack wanted my advice about yet one more act of cruelty in this kind world that is not— I repeat, not—ancient Rome. The cruelty was not, of course, Jack’s and certainly not directed at Caprice, who was dancing and bouncing around as we sat at Jack’s kitchen table drinking good coffee with real cream.

“Caprice looks good,” I said. “You haven’t let her put on weight.” I’d been wondering whether Caprice was the reason he wanted to see me. It seemed hard to believe that she’d developed some kind of behavior problem, but dogs feel loss, too, and maybe she was showing it.

“She’s fine, except she keeps bringing me her leash. Rose taught her to fetch it. Vera did the same thing. Rose’d say, ‘Come on, let’s do some work!’ and Caprice’d go and get the leash and carry it to her. And now she’ll just go get it, all on her own, and jump around all excited and look at me.” He shrugged. “And I’m supposed to know what to do? I’m supposed to know where to begin? So I take it, and I tell her ‘Good girl,’ and maybe I take her out for a walk or I get her to dance or roll over or something, and then I give her a cookie, but she knows. She knows.”

Cookie, by the way, is what a lot of old-time handlers call a dog biscuit. Don’t ask me why, but they do, and the word reminded me of Rose, who always used it. My mother did, too. I hoped Jack also knew the right kind of cookies to buy, not those mushy supermarket ones, but the expensive, really hard ones that remove tartar.

“Jack, I know everyone must be saying, ‘If there’s anything I can do...’ But is there?” It occurred to me that he might ask me to work with Caprice, to train her and handle her, or, preferably, from my point of view, to help him find a professional to do it. “Do you need any help with Caprice?”

He shook his head slowly and smiled. “Thank you,” he said. “She’s no trouble. The only trouble is she’s still looking for Rose. And Heather Ross offered. She offered to handle her. But I don’t think Rose would’ve liked that.”

“I don’t think so, either,” I said, and then tried to make it clear that, unlike Heather, I wasn’t fishing for a chance to handle Caprice. “I didn’t mean... I mean, if you decide you want someone to handle her, I can find you someone, but I’m not a professional handler.”

“Oh, no, no, I wasn’t asking,” he assured me. “No, no. Maybe sometime, but... No. What I want is... From time to time, you do some rescue work?”

Caprice gave a sudden bound and landed in Jack’s lap. He rubbed the black curls on her head. I stared at both of them. It had never occurred to me that he’d want to get rid of her.

I must have looked horrified, but I nodded. “A little. Hardly any. Mostly a few malamutes. You want...? But you don’t need...” If he didn’t want Caprice, he could sell her. The poodle rescue league, like all the others—for Akitas, goldens, malamutes, Dobermans, shelties, you name it—ends up with some wonderful, perfectly trainable dogs, but nobody but nobody hands over a dog like Caprice to a rescue league.

But I’d misread Jack. It was the first time since Rose’s death that I’d heard his rolling laugh. “You should see your face!” It was probably red. “I couldn’t imagine, but...”

Then he turned serious. “Let me show you something. Caprice, move.” She hopped to the floor. He got up, opened a cabinet, pulled out a photo developer’s envelope, and came back to the table. “Rose was the world’s worst photographer,” he said. “Every picture she ever took had a tree sticking out of someone’s head, or people had their eyes closed, or it was out of focus. But take a look at this, anyway.”

In the photograph he handed me, the only object in sharp focus was the tall Norway maple between his house and the Johnsons’. The man and the dog to the right of the tree and some distance behind it, in the Johnsons’ yard, were too blurred to identify with any certainty. The man’s hair was blond, but he was even more out of focus than the dog, probably because he’d been moving. The dog looked like a shepherd, but I couldn’t tell for sure which one. The man could’ve been either of the sons I’d seen. He seemed to be hitting the dog with something, maybe a baseball bat, but even the action wasn’t entirely clear.

“Rose took this,” I said. “Did she say who it is? And which dog?”

Jack shook his head. “Never said a word.”

“Why?”

“The why’s the one thing I know,” he said, patting his thigh to call Caprice. She ran toward him and leapt into his lap. “Good girl.” Then he seemed to change the subject. “You want to know something about a good marriage? I’ll tell you a secret. You want to find a good husband, you find somebody who’ll always give you a good argument. Religion, politics, anything. Whatever else you do, Holly, if you want to stay married, you don’t marry yourself. You have to agree to disagree. And maybe nobody likes it, and nobody understands why you did such a crazy thing, but forget it.
You
do.”

I wasn’t sure I understood, but I nodded, anyway.

“So about any kind of trouble—causing any kind of trouble, stirring things up—Rose and I did not always see eye-to-eye. I wanted peace. I still do.”

“With the Johnsons.”

“With the Johnsons. And now? This is my home.” He stretched a hand in the direction of their house. “Theirs is theirs. I want to stay, I live with them. We coexist.”

“So when Rose took the picture, she just did it, and she had it developed. And she didn’t say anything to you.”

He nodded. “But she did talk about... You remember that case? She followed that very closely.”

“The man who was convicted.”

Jack nodded again. Practically everyone in Massachusetts knew about the case. A guy had been convicted and sent to jail sometime the previous winter or early spring because a smart, caring neighbor didn’t just run out screaming and yelling when the guy was beating his dog with a board, but carefully took a whole series of photographs. The neighbor’s photographic evidence was crucial.

“So,” I said, “she knew that pictures would do it, that if she got it on film, she could really get him. It’s a little hard to tell in this picture, but why else would she’ve taken it? She saw whoever it is beating a dog, and she remembered the case. So she got the camera. This is the only one? The only picture?”

“She was a terrible photographer,” he said affectionately. “Yeah.” It was impossible to disagree. I nearly asked him whether he’d been keeping an eye on the Johnsons’ house and yard, but I stopped myself. He’d had other concerns. “Obviously, this isn’t enough. I wonder if... At a match, not so long ago—Rose was there—the middle brother, Dale, showed up with his dog, and he started hitting him, right there. There was sort of a scene. But... from what I can tell, this looks... Is this still going on?”

He looked as if I’d taken a long time to grasp the point. “You’re asking me? I’m asking you.”

“You haven’t seen...?”

“No, I haven’t seen. I want peace, but not peace at any price.

And Rose understood that. She wasn’t keeping any secret from me. She was waiting. And now...? You’ve seen these dogs?”

“I’ve seen Willie’s dog quite a bit, mostly from a distance, though. He trains with us, but I’m not in the same class. I’m not positive I can tell, but Righteous—that’s the dog—he doesn’t look abused. Usually you expect something. If you move your hand toward the dog, maybe he’ll shy away. He’ll cringe, or he’ll show fear.” I reached my hand across the table toward Caprice, who had planted herself cheerfully in Jack’s lap. She elongated her neck and gave a happy little stretch in my direction. “That’s exactly what you don’t see,” I said. “You can tell what she expects. Hands mean pats, food, good things. With an abused dog, you get the opposite. And they see feet, they expect to be kicked. But it isn’t always that obvious. And those old stories about loyalty to abusive owners are basically true. You might think they’d hate the owners, but they don’t. You’re more apt to see fear. Or aggression. Sometimes it’s real terror of something. A place. A situation.”

“If it’s going on . . Jack started to say.

“You have to decide,” I finished for him.

He looked insulted. “If this is going on next door to
Rose’s
house?”

“Of course,” I said. “Look, about the pictures. Rose was right. That seems to be what works, lots of hard evidence. Pictures. Do you know how to use a camera? Could you...?” He didn’t brag. All he did was show me some blowups of photos he’d taken of Rose, Vera, Caprice, and a couple of other poodles posed with a very young Rose.

“These are incredible,” I said. I meant it. In case you didn’t know, dogs aren’t easy to photograph, and taking good pictures of dogs and people together is tough. “I guess you could more than manage a snapshot.”

“I have the camera upstairs, loaded,” he said. “By a window. Where Rose took this one. But I haven’t...”

“There’s the MSPCA. There’s also a lawyer I know,” I said. “He knows about things like this. If there’s anything else you could do, or anything anyone can do, he’ll know. You want his name?”

After I wrote it down for him, he walked me to the door. On the way, I told him that I’d been to see his sister and that she seemed like a terrific dentist.

“Charlotte’s been a peach,” he said. “The whole, uh, all of it, it’s been easier since our mother passed away. Last winter, it was. She was, uh, she could never, never have accepted Rose.”

“Has your father left? He’s gone back to Florida?”

“Still with Charlotte.” I had the grace not to say: “Oh, and not with you?” But the question must’ve shown on my face.

Jack leaned against the frame of the front door. “It’s unbelievable. My mother passes away last winter, cancer. She’s eighty-six, older than he is. You ask him, she dies of old age? No. Cancer? No. Her son married a shiksa. She died of a broken heart, he tells me. So now he’s here, he discovers Charlotte’s not keeping kosher. She hasn’t kept kosher since she left for college, but now he discovers, and now she’s a shiksa, and he won’t eat here, it’s all
trayf,
and he won’t eat from Charlotte’s kitchen, it’s all
trayf,
too, all dirty.”

“Isn’t he getting hungry?”

“He eats deli. He eats nothing but deli, breakfast, lunch, dinner.”

“It’s probably very nutritious, anyway,” I said.

“He has a lot to eat and a lot to complain about. He’s never been happier.” Jack beamed. “Eighty-five. Looks seventy. Acts fifteen. Myself, I want peace. Growing up in my family... they made the Knesset sound like a Quaker meeting. And now Don, my nephew, he says the word
autopsy.
” Actually, I was surprised to hear Jack say it. He was hardly Orthodox—Orthodox Jews don’t believe in autopsies—and wouldn’t object on religious grounds, but maybe I expected him to share my own family’s taboo on uttering the word aloud. He went on: “Rose would care? I tell him, have I got news for you. Rose was not Jewish. Every year, in our home, she had a Christmas tree. But my father is ready to fight city hall, they did an autopsy on the wife of his son.”

“He sounds very lively,” I said.

“He leaves in forty-eight hours. Charlotte is counting them.” But I had the impression that if Jack’s father liked complaining, Jack himself enjoyed complaining about the complaints. There was warmth in his voice when he spoke his sister’s name and when he mentioned his nephew. Well, why not? He was happy to have his family back again.

Chapter 15

“THIS doesn’t say anything about washing the dog,” insisted Leah, waving a copy of the AKC Obedience Regulations. “All it says is that they can’t be blind or deaf or ‘changed by artificial means,’ whatever that is. For all you know, soap is an artificial means.”

All I knew was more than she did. “It means surgery and things like that. Bleaches. Dyes. It doesn’t mean not to wash the dog.” The rule doesn’t ban training with shock collars, either, but it ought to. If an electric shock isn’t an artificial means, I don’t know what is. “Believe me, no judge wants to examine a dirty dog. At a minimum, you’ve got to brush her.”

Rowdy was standing on the grooming table in the driveway. In preparation for a match the next day, I was religiously stroking his coat with a slicker brush. I’d started grooming him as soon as I returned from Jack’s. Leah was sitting on the back steps with Kimi sprawled at her feet. Thick clumps of white undercoat grew like tumors from Kimi’s flanks.

“But it’s boring! Why don’t we just wait until they’re both done shedding and then clean it all up at once?”

“Because we live here, too, for one thing, and for another, I don’t want to be seen with her looking like that.”