The Wicked Flea (21 page)

I broke off. Wilson was staring at me. “S & I’s,” he said.

“Yes. It’s a burger joint, really. Fried clams. That kind of thing. This was the one on Route 20. It’s a local chain. But—”

“I know what S & I’s is,” he said, looking stunned. “And you don’t?”

“Yes I do. I just told you.”

“S & I’s,” he informed me, “is the family business. Pia’s father started it. Then Sylvia took over. Get it? S and I. Sylvia and Ian. It was
Sylvia’s
restaurant.”

Chapter 27

Subj: Re: Genetic Clearances

From:
[email protected]

To:
[email protected]

----------------

Hi Cindy,

Many thanks for sending Emma's OFA
⁶
information and all the rest. My scanner is acting up, so I have Xeroxed and snail-mailed you the information about Rowdy. You've probably checked the OFA database online, but I've sent the certificates, anyway. His hips are OFA Excellent, and his elbows are normal. Obviously, chondrodysplasia
⁷
isn't an issue in our lines, but he's CHD clear. As you can see on the CERF
⁸
web site, Rowdy's last eye exam was in August, and his eyes are clear. I have mailed you a copy of Dr. Fabian's full report. Everything was normal. I had a full thyroid panel
⁹
done in June. The Michigan State report is in the packet I sent, all normal. By the way, Rowdy has full dentition and a PERFECT scissors bite. If dogs could model for toothpaste commercials, I'd be rich.

Holly

Chapter 28

Subj: Re: Genetic Clearances

From:
[email protected]

To:
[email protected]

-----------------

Hi Cindy,

It isn't exactly a genetic clearance, but I forgot to mention that Rowdy has absolutely outstanding pigment. His eyes are so dark that they're almost black. Even his gums are black.

I'll get a new brucellosis
¹⁰
test. At the moment, I'm without a regular vet. It's complicated. I'll tell you about it when you and Emma are here. My animals aren't the issue. I am. I can always use Angell Memorial. Come to think of it, I could do with an angel myself.

Holly

Chapter 29

S & I’s. Sylvia and Ian’s. The Trasks’ rodent ruse no longer seemed quite so foolish, and Wilson’s suspicions about the Trasks didn’t seem quite so ridiculous. As I interviewed Erna L. Sporter, my mind’s eye kept seeing the faces of the little Trask girls, and my ears rang with little Di’s proud claim about her dog:
Charlie can do that! Charlie can do that, only better!
In dog heaven. In this life, what lay ahead for Charlie was a shaved foreleg and then a green needle. Unless the Trasks won their lawsuit. Now that I knew who owned—or had owned—S & I’s, I half hoped they did.

Although freestyle is a super upbeat sport and although Erna and her Dalmatian were two of its most upbeat enthusiasts, the interview depressed me, mainly because I’d already written the same kind of article a few hundred times, as had a few hundred other dog writers. The topic could’ve been worse, meaning that I could’ve been writing about what to feed (or not to feed) your dog, how to keep your dog cool in the summer heat, or how to prevent and cure flea infestations, an itchy subject I’d scratched so many times that merely thinking about it gave me human hot spots. Anyway, Erna's Dalmatian, Eddie, had three legs. Not credits-toward-a-title legs, earned by qualifying the required number of times, but four Dalmatian legs minus the one he’d had removed.

Dogs with three legs do so well that it seems apparent that every dog is born with a spare one, and Eddie was perfectly used to having only three legs and performed nimbly on them, so he was not the cause of my bad mood. Or maybe I should say that Eddie wasn’t the direct cause. What got to me was that Erna, who was tiny and wiry, kept chirping about how much Eddie loved the music he’d chosen for his routine and how excited he got about performing and on and on until I couldn’t help asking myself, If this dog can
love
and
dance
and have
fun
for God’s sake on three legs, why can’t I manage to shuffle along a little more happily without Steve Delaney? To make matters worse, as if comparing Steve to an amputated Dalmatian leg weren’t bad enough, I immediately realized that he was the only man on earth who wouldn’t feel even mildly insulted by the analogy. So then I started thinking about that feminist slogan. You know the one?
A woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle.
And what I started thinking was—need I remind you that I train dogs?—that a clever animal trainer would have no difficulty in teaching a fish to ride a specially constructed underwater bicycle. Fin-propelled pedals. Bubble steering. And after the fish had gotten really good at riding the bicycle? And you went and took the bicycle away? Well, you’d end up with a fish who missed the bicycle, which is to say, one very sad fish.

“Holly, are you all right?” Erna asked gently. “I heard about your accident. Is there anything I can do?”

With that, she began rummaging in a capacious tote bag and was soon offering me antidotes for anything that might ail me. Beware of accepting medical help from dog people, including me. Half the time, we’ll dose you with ordinary over-the-human-pharmacy-counter medications that are good for both dogs and people, but we’re equally likely to offer the veterinary salve that worked wonders on Fido’s sore ear or the painkillers Lady didn’t use up after she was spayed. In this case, Erna produced a vial of dried vegetation that looked like marijuana, but was, she insisted, a potent herbal remedy that cured Eddie of his periodic bouts of stage fright. I was supposed to put the stuff under my tongue and hold it there for as long as I could without swallowing. I was on the verge of asking how she got Eddie to comply with those instructions when all of a sudden, I saw myself as if from afar, and everything hit me as simply too crazy, the tiny woman who danced with the three-legged dog, the prospect of doping myself with dog medicine, the training possibilities of fish and bicycles, and I rapidly excused myself and fled. According to the Bible, it’s the wicked who flee— when no man pursueth.

When I got home, Kimi and Rowdy were so thrilled to see me that they dashed around, bounced in the air, and sang loud peals of
woo-woo-woo.
As Kimi had so forcefully demonstrated at S & I’s, malamutes exhibit what is known as “genetic hunger,” meaning that they enjoy a genetically programmed conviction that they are in ever-present danger of starving to death. In the breed’s Arctic homeland, the danger was real. In my well-stocked Cambridge kitchen, Rowdy and Kimi eat as if it still were. For that reason, I cannot just feed my dogs in a normal sort of way by dumping kibble into dishes and putting them on the floor, and I wouldn’t dream of just leaving food out. Even with peaceable breeds, free feeding is usually a bad idea. Dogs with constant access to a full bowl often get fat. Some, in contrast, turn into picky eaters. Worse, free-fed dogs have a tendency to become aggressive, in part because they are spared frequent reminders of their dependence on human beings for life’s essentials. Well, enough preaching. My dogs eat twice a day, the second meal being dinner, served at approximately five o’clock, and since the time was now five-fifteen, Rowdy and Kimi were performing their own version of freestyle to their own music. To prevent them from getting into a snarling, bloody fight, I have to separate them. I’d just finished hitching Kimi to the hall door at one end of the kitchen and Rowdy to the living room door at the other end when the phone rang.

I grabbed it. “Hello?” Or that’s what I presume I said. The dogs’ shrieking made it impossible to hear anything. I should’ve let the machine pick up, but I’m active in malamute rescue, and I’m always afraid of missing a life-or-death call. Most people will leave a message, call back, or visit our web site (www. malamuterescue.org), but every once in a while, the call is from a malamute owner or a shelter worker who tells me that a sweet, friendly malamute is going to be put down immediately unless someone helps. Since I couldn’t hear this caller at all, I shouted a plea to call me back in a few minutes. Then I hung up and fed the dogs. In the twenty seconds it took them to clean their bowls, I checked the caller-ID box. Its display read Private Call Number Blocked. He’d been ringing me quite often, probably to invite me to dinner at a trendy restaurant. My most ardent suitor, however, was Out of Area, who was always trying to reach me in the hope, no doubt, of seducing me into spending a romantic weekend with him in some charming out-of-area country inn. Data Error called occasionally, but I didn’t like the sound of him one single bit (Date Error?) and was happy to miss his calls.

Not that I needed to feel like Miss Popularity. After all, even though it was Saturday evening, I had plenty of things to occupy me and was a few years beyond the absolute need for a date. Reminding myself of my age didn’t help a lot. To boost my spirits, I decided to walk the dogs. They, at least, wanted to go out with me, even if no one else did. And when they’re with me, I draw a whole lot of admiring glances. The dogs and I had barely descended my back stairs when we ran into Rita. By now, night had fallen, and the temperature with it, and Rita was hurrying to get indoors to warm up and get ready to go out with Artie Spicer, who was her birding mentor and the man in her life. Approximately two seconds after the back door had shut itself behind Rita, the dogs and I reached the sidewalk, and Kevin Dennehy’s great bulk loomed out of a shadow and startled me. He was leaving to pick up Jennifer Pasquarelli and didn’t have time to talk.

I should mention that my neighborhood is interesting and diverse. It has single-family and multifamily dwellings, the Hi-Rise bakery, the Fishmonger, gourmet take-out shops, a branch of the Cambridge Public Library, a fabulous restaurant—Aspasia, on Walden Street—and an extraordinary number of renovated three-deckers cut up into psychotherapy offices. So why had Rita sent me all the way out to Newton? If I was too crazy for Cambridge, I was in terrible trouble. Anyway, my heterogeneous neighborhood borders the homogeneous magnificence of the area around Brattle Street, and the dogs and I often take advantage of our proximity to the grand colonials and Victorians and the splendid gardens of Off Brattle. I gawk and fantasize. Rowdy and Kimi snuffle with special enthusiasm, as if the privileged dogs who inhabit the twenty-room houses anoint their shrubs and trees with posh-smelling urine that simply begs for overmarking by tough-guy malamutes.

Tonight, instead of choosing the opulent route, I made the mistake of heading up Concord Avenue in the direction of the Square, turning right onto Huron, and following it, thus passing shops where couples had bought wine, cheese, and other delicacies that they were now sharing, a pizzeria where couples were placing orders and nibbling slices, and, worst of all, cou-pies themselves. Cambridge being Cambridge, the couples were old, young, academic, townie, heterosexual, gay, lesbian, and ethnically everything. It should, but perhaps does not, go without saying that all these people had one thing in common: each member of every couple was paired off. Kevin Dennehy was with Jennifer Pasquarelli. Rita was going out with Artie Spicer. Grubby Wilson was married to athletic Pia. My father was married to Gabrielle. Tim and Brianna Trask had each another. Sylvia and Ian Metzner had been united as S & I. In front of a toy store on Huron Avenue, an expectant mother pointed out something in the window to a man whose arm rested on her shoulders. Rowdy would, I hoped, be bred to Emma. Still, he and Kimi were a pair. Ahead of me, they made a handsome brace.

Steve Delaney would have married me. He’d asked. Often. I’d refused. Often. It had never crossed my mind that he’d marry someone else.

Cutting our walk short, I headed home. When I reached the back door, the phone was ringing, but by the time I answered it, Private Call Number Blocked had hung up. The answering machine showed no messages.

Sitting on the kitchen counter near the machine was a terrific book that Gabrielle had given me,
Urban Foxes
by Stephen Harris. I tried to read it, but it depressed me. Foxes live in family groups. My third-floor tenants, a couple, naturally, were away for the weekend, and since Rita was also going out, I decided that I was free to stink up the place by working on my own book. A friend had E-mailed me a new recipe for liver brownies. Like brownies for people, liver brownies (no chocolate, which is toxic to dogs) are an old standby, so I didn’t want to embarrass myself by including a recipe that didn’t work. To forestall another kind of embarrassment, let me mention that testing the recipes didn’t require my tasting the products. Ugh. Rather, the testing consisted simply of making sure that the goodies solidified in proper dog-treat fashion and held together after they’d cooled. As taste-testers, Rowdy and Kimi were useless, since they gave dew-claws up to absolutely anything. Their own recipes are simple and effortless, but a bit too disgusting and, in some cases, graphic to appear in my book. The dogs have, however, persuaded me to share a few here.