Paws before dying (17 page)

As it was, I did no more than catch their group exercises out of the corner of my eye, because Rowdy and I were busy in another ring, where the ninety-five degrees melted his usual inventiveness. When I sent him over the high jump, he soared, but I could feel him ponder the possibility of ambling slowly and coolly back around it. “Jump!” I yelled silently, and he sprang up nicely, clearing the top with room to spare, returned briskly, and sat only a trifle crooked to present the dumbbell.

Rowdy and I had only a short break before the group exercises, just enough time to get some water in, on, and under him and to learn that Kimi had qualified. As I returned to the ring at the end of the long down, I spotted a dark blotch in the shade under the judge’s table, but it turned out to be someone else’s blotch, a black standard poodle who’d decided it was better to be out of the sun than in the ribbons. Rowdy was impatiently twitching his plumy white tail back and forth, but he was where I’d left him, and unless he’d taken a stroll in my absence, he’d qualified.

Back in the shade, Leah was pouring water into Kimi’s bowl.

“So?” I said.

“So we qualified.” She sounded as if there’d never been any doubt, but the excitement showed on her face.

“Great!” I upended a water jug on top of my head, sent a cold stream down my back, took a big swig, and poured the rest into Rowdy’s bowl. Then I rummaged in my kit bag for the dogs’ rewards, outsize dog biscuits I reserve for shows. The dogs were nuzzling and salivating, but as I pulled out the biscuits, Kimi vanished, and Rowdy hit the end of his leash. When I looked up, Abbey was holding out two closed fists. Rowdy was bouncing and eyeing her hands, and Kimi, the furry piranha, was about to strike.

“Okay?” Abbey said. “Homemade microwave liver.”

Heather and Panache were nowhere in sight.

“Sure,” I said. “They’ve earned it. Thanks.”

The dogs snatched the brown stuff from her hands and licked her palms clean, but she scrubbed her hands with a towel, anyway.

“Sorry, guys,” I said to the dogs as I gave them the biscuits. “Second best, but all I’ve got. Microwave, huh?”

Abbey nodded. “Works like magic.”

“I do liver in the oven sometimes,” I said, “but not in the summer. It takes forever, and you can’t get rid of the smell.”

“You ought to get a microwave,” Abbey said. “You just throw it in and nuke it. We got it from Rose because she didn’t trust it after she got the pacemaker. You knew about that?”

I nodded.

“Well, after she got it, the microwave made her nervous. I gather that if they don’t work just so, they mess up the pacemaker. Hers was okay, but she wanted to get rid of it, anyway, and she gave it to us, and there’s nothing wrong with it. You ought to get one.”

“Obviously, the dogs think so,” I said.

Soon afterward, Heather and Panache came dancing back on silver heels, and a couple of minutes later, the stewards started calling us back into the rings—that is, those whose dogs had qualified. A sweet-faced young woman and her Bernese mountain dog stood just in front of Rowdy and me at the head of the line along the edge of the ring. The Bernese mountain dog happens to be one of my favorite breeds. They’re big, strong dogs with long, silky black coats and white and rust markings, gorgeous dogs and loving, loyal companions. This one was a very feminine-looking bitch, probably too small to show in breed, but a first-rate obedience worker. I’d seen her at other shows, and I’d watched her today.

“She’s doing great,” I said to her handler. “I saw her today.”

“Yeah, she’s finally shaping up,” the woman said.

“She looks great. Did you have some...?”

“Yeah, she started giving me a hard time, and I had to get out the old electronics. But that took care of that.” She smiled and patted the dog’s head. I wanted to kick her.

The Bernese mountain dog got first place, of course, but when the judge handed me the second-place ribbon and a drinking glass for the collection, Rowdy knew who’d really won. When people applauded, he woo-wooed, and as the judge kept handing out the ribbons, he kept it up, and some of the spectators started laughing. The Bernese won first place and my sympathy, but Rowdy won the crowd.

“Happy worker,” commented the handler of the Bernese mountain dog, meaning that Rowdy had never been serious competition. “Congratulations. ”

“Thanks.” I walked away. “She thinks I’m a sore loser,” I told Rowdy. “Let her.”

Against some mean competition in Novice B—it looked like a poodle breed ring—Kimi won third place, plus yet another tumbler, and Leah underwent a rapid shift in apparent age from a cool twenty-one to an ecstatic, unguarded twelve. “Isn’t she wonderful? Aren’t you proud of her? She is the most wonderful dog in the world, aren’t you, Kimi? Aren’t you? So now I can register her for a trial, right? The second we get home.”

As I finished packing up our belongings, the fatigue suddenly hit me hard. “Speaking of home,” I said, thinking disjointedly of PTA presidents, pacemakers, microwaves, and the old electronics, “how would you like to drive? I’m sweltering, and I’m so tired. Oh, there’s Bess. You ought to tell her. Her feelings will be hurt if you don’t.”

Near the registration table, Bess Stein was surrounded by people and dogs, including, I noticed, Willie Johnson and Righteous. The sides of Willie’s head looked freshly shaved. He had the dog’s lead in one hand and a green qualifying ribbon in the other.

“Hey, Willie,” Leah said as happily as if our fence had been washed in white instead of fouled in red. “Congratulations! Hi, Righteous. You were a good boy, huh?”

In back of Willie stood a young man I had no trouble identifying as the third Johnson brother—in other words, the first Mitchell Dale Johnson, Jr. He had the same white-blond hair, thick cheeks, and heavy-boned build as Dale and Willie, but he was thinner than the other two, and his hair was slicked back on the sides and poufed up on the crown of his head. He had on tasseled leather loafers, tan pants with sharp, deliberate creases, and an unfaded black polo shirt. My own white pants were grass-stained and wrinkled, and I hadn’t combed my hair since I’d doused it with water, but I didn’t feel inferior. I had two Alaskan malamutes. The only animal he had was a small embroidered horse over his heart, and someone else was riding it.

“Nice husky,” he said to me. About one person in a hundred gets it right. He pointed at Rowdy as if he were a flashy car, an object.

“Close,” I said. “Alaskan malamute. Malamutes are bigger. They all have brown eyes.”

“Tough, huh?”

I nodded. “Strong.” Well, they
are
strong. “You Willie’s brother?”

“Mitch.” He extended his hand in one of those gestures that salesmen learn somewhere. When he shook my hand, I was aware that my palm was breaded in dog drool, IAMS biscuits, and fur, and that his wasn’t, or it wasn’t before. When he with-; drew his hand, I could tell that he wanted to wipe it on some-1 thing, but instead of scraping it off on his thigh, he reached I toward Rowdy, who did something almost unprecedented. He braced himself on all fours and growled. I tried not to look I stunned. The sound was very deep, almost inaudible, and deadly serious. “Don’t touch me,” it said. “And don’t touch her again, either.”

But Mitch heard it. “Sorry,” he said, backing off a step. “Tough guy.”

“He won’t hurt you,” I said. “But probably you shouldn’t pat him, just in case. Rowdy, sit.” He did, but he kept one eye on Mitch and the other on me. “Nice to meet you,” I said to Mitch. “We’ve got to go. I have a fence to work on when I get j home.”

He looked puzzled.

“Someone painted it for me last night,” I said, “but I don’t like the color. It used to be white. Now it’s red.” Then I made a belated introduction: “I’m Holly Winter.” I gestured toward Leah. Bess had an arm around her, and Willie was standing next to her. “That’s my cousin, Leah. Well, nice to meet you.”

It took me a few minutes to retrieve Leah and Kimi. Bess had to congratulate me and hear our score, and on the way to the parking lot, we ran into some people and spent a few minutes comparing notes and talking about the trials coming up. When we’d finally stashed the dogs and our gear in the back of the Bronco, I collapsed in the passenger seat, and Leah got the engine and the air-conditioning going. As she pulled out of the ' lot, I saw Willie cram his shepherd into the backseat of a red and white Corvette and lower himself in. Mitch, who’d been standing by the car giving people a chance to notice what he drove, climbed into the driver’s seat and shut the door.

If people noticed the Corvette at all, what registered was probably nothing more than how out of place it looked among all of the full-size station wagons, vans, and roomy 4 X 4s bought to accommodate dogs, crates, grooming tables, coolers, and more dogs. The brothers looked out of place, too, and at a dog show or a match, that’s not easy. Whether you’re five or eighty-five, rich or poor, chunky or svelte, dressed in denim or velvet, the first thing people notice about you isn’t you at all, but your dogs and how you treat them. After that? After that, I suppose it’s a matter of looking at home, which doesn’t necessarily mean having a dog with you, but does mean looking as if you should and, certainly, keeping your eyes on every dog in sight. Or maybe it just means looking happy. “Finally!” our faces say. “Finally! For once! For these few hours, enough fur! Bliss.” In spite of the handsome shepherd and the green ribbon, Willie and Mitch didn’t have that look. But I remembered where they’d come from.

Chapter 18

IN the hours I slept after coming home from the match, a heavy rain fell, and cold, beautiful Canada delivered its most valuable export, a sudden temperature drop of about twenty degrees. In the late afternoon, Steve and I drove to Newton to let the dogs run in the woods that stretched behind and far beyond Eliot Park, the beer-lovers’ lane that Rose and Jack had complained about. It wasn’t a place I’d have gone alone at night even with two Akitas instead of two Alaskan welcome wagons, but in the late afternoon with Steve and his two dogs as well as Rowdy and Kimi along, the woods felt safe enough. Besides, they were wild-looking, with unpruned maples, oaks, evergreens, and underbrush. Any sensible dog owner realizes that in an unmaintained park like that, the narrow, rough trails may appear to meander and fork at random, but they don’t. If viewed from on high, God’s perspective, those paths spell out a hidden message: “Great place to violate leash law.”

“The main thing,” I was saying to Steve, “is that I don’t trust kids at all. I at least understand dogs, but I don’t understand children except that what I do understand is, if you try to house-break them, it screws them up for life, and they chew things, and then they make a lot of noise, and then they leave. So if you want golden-haired babies all that badly, take Leah for the rest of the summer or get another dog. And could we talk about something else?” I snapped.

“PMS?”

“Shock collars.”

“Radical remedy,” said Steve, stopping to encircle my neck with his hands and making a loud zapping noise, “but it’s not such a bad idea.” Then he moved his hands and said softly, “When you took that nap this afternoon, you could’ve called me. Just because you live alone, it doesn’t mean you have to sleep alone.”

“In case you’ve forgotten, I don’t live alone until Labor Day. Leah and about five other kids were in the kitchen boning up for the SATs.” I nuzzled my face in his once-navy T-shirt. Like| everything he owns, it was faded and had a faint, lingering odor of chlorine bleach. A streak of adolescent self-consciousness 1 makes him want to avoid smelling like dogs and cats. Actually, he smells like dogs, cats, and chlorine, but only if you’re really close to him.”

He ran his hands over my face and pulled my hair back, then started to kiss me, but Kimi and Rowdy came zipping down a wooded slope and landed at our feet. They squirmed around, tilted their big heads upward, widened their almond eyes, and began wooing. They weren’t trying to protect me from Steve, of course. They just didn’t want to be left out. When Steve’s dogs—Lady, the pointer, and India, his perfect shepherd bitch—joined the circle, we gave up and resumed our walk.

“Actually, I do need to know about shock collars,” I said. “You must hear about them, right? In veterinary school? Or you have clients who—?”

He shook his head. “Those people don’t work with us. I probably don’t know any more about shock collars than you do.” j “You don’t see burns? They do bum, don’t they?”

“Oh, the old ones burned,” he said sadly, kicking a small log off the path. “But not the new ones, at least not the expensive ones. Not unless they malfunction.”

“But if they do? Or an old one. There ought to be two burns, right? I’ve seen the ads. And the catalogs. That’s basically all I know, from that propaganda. Anyway, there are these plugs that go in the collar, with contact points, metal spikes. And that’s what delivers the shock.”

“Stimulation,” he corrected sarcastically.

“Oh, right. Pardon the slip. Anyway, that’s what would bum, right? The whole collar isn’t electrified. It isn’t a circle of electricity around the neck. It’s two points, spikes, like bullets. They stick out of the inside of the collar and into the dog’s neck. So if it burns, it’d leave two marks.”

He shrugged.

“Steve, that’s what they found on Rose’s body. Two burn marks.”

“On her neck?”