by Susan Conant
By eight thirty-five, Vince's advanced beginners were getting ready to work on recalls.
"You're going to tell your dog to stay," Vince was saying. "Don't use his name. Put your hand, palm down, in front of his nose. Tell him to stay, and walk to the end of your leash."
Roz's dogs were learning to stay, too, but to stay still with wooden dumbbells in their mouths. After that, they'd do jumps, which most dogs adore, and then the long down with the handlers out of sight. Dog training classes are predictable. They nearly always end with a long down because that's the last exercise at an obedience trial.
At a little after eight forty-five, I heard Roz say, right on schedule, "Handlers, down your dogs."
Downing a dog might sound a little alarming, but all it means is to tell your dog to lie down.
"Leave your dogs," she said.
Steve, Diane, and Lynne marched toward the desk, past us, and through the door to the offices. People walk funny when they're leaving their dogs or returning to them. In an obedience trial, moving your head around, brushing the hair out of your face, or making any other normal gesture might be considered a signal to the dog. You're also supposed to act natural, but hardly anybody does.
Ron and Dr. Stanton walked by the desk, too, avoiding the advanced beginners, and out through the doors to the entrance hall. After about a minute, Curly stood up, which is, of course, against the rules in a long down, and Roz called out to ask us to get Diane. Like many miniature poodles, Curly is smart and mischievous. He knows that he's supposed to stay down.
Diane was just around the corner from the desk.
"Curly's up," I told her, and she paraded indignantly back to correct him, then left again. Curly's disobedience is one hundred percent deliberate. You can always tell when he's going to pull something cute. He starts by moving his head just a little bit back and forth. His little black eyes gleam. If he's supposed to stay down, he stands up. If he's supposed to stand still, he does a soft-shoe. Diane sometimes worries that success is spoiling him.
At about eight-fifty, Roz called out, "Handlers, return to your dogs."
Ron came in through the swinging doors, and Diane, Steve, and Lynne through the door to the offices.
"Handlers," Roz called again, smiling. Roz smiles a lot. She's about forty-five. She has short, practical gray hair, and she usually wears a T-shirt with a picture of a West Highland white terrier, of which she owns three.
This was not the first time Dr. Stanton had failed to return. He liked to wait outdoors on the front steps, and although his hearing was much better than his vision, he didn't always hear Roz.
"Rowdy knows if I haven't really left," Dr. Stanton always said. "I don't know how he knows, but he knows."
Maybe Dr. Stanton was right. Except for wagging his long-haired tail, perking up his ears, and casting his big dark eyes at the other dogs, Rowdy hadn't budged. Some people will tell you that a malamute can't be trained. They're wrong. Either they don't understand malamutes or they don't put in the time.
"Will someone get Frank?" Roz called out.
But Dr. Frank Stanton never released his beautiful dog from that long down. Frank Stanton was on the longest down of all.
2
When I went to find Dr. Stanton, Gerry Pitts, the building manager, came with me, just in case, I suppose, someone arriving early for the nine o'clock Novice class was exercising a dog on the lawn. Looking out toward Concord Avenue from the entrance hall, I noticed Hal hanging around on the sidewalk. Half of Cambridge would have recognized Hal, and quite a few people would have known his name, as I did, because he would have introduced himself while he was returning trash bags full of cans and bottles at the Broadway Supermarket or lurking around parking meters mumbling to himself. Few of the shelter's clients have faces as memorably aristocratic as Hal's, and since the night was not bitterly cold, none of the others had yet arrived.
Gerry held one of the glass doors open for me, and as I walked through, I called, "Dr. Stanton?"
"Maybe he's gone to the men's room," Gerry said. "I'll take a look."
Although the weather was not cold enough to have drawn an early crowd to the shelter, it was a little too chilly for my T-shirt and jeans, and I trotted down the walk to keep warm. Hal, who must have thought I was after him, scuttled off toward the playground that's next to the armory. In Cambridge, a homeless guy who drinks isn't necessarily paranoid if he thinks that people are after him.
"He's not there," Gerry called from the doorway, and I reversed my direction.
Gerry, on principle, scanned the lawn and must have noticed that the gate was open, the chain-link gate to the right of the entrance if you're facing the building. I saw Gerry bend over, and when I heard his sick groan, I started running. Dr. Stanton lay on the lawn just inside the gate.
"I'll get Steve," I said.
Without Dr. Stanton, a D.V.M. was the closest the club came to an M.D. Besides, if you think about it, how much do M.D.s really know about medicine? All they do is specialize in the trivial diseases of one late-evolved species that threatens all the others. A D.V.M., on the other hand, has to know all about everything from avian lice to canine brucellosis, bovine petechial fever, and African horse sickness. If a vet's patients aren't watched carefully, they'll bite him or kick him, or they might even eat their young. Anyway, Steve understands heart attacks. Dogs and cats have them, and I assumed that Dr. Stanton had had one, too.
Steve was still at the far end of the hall with India and Roz and the others, and I waved to him to come to the entrance. He'd released India, but he put her on another long down. Even from the opposite end of the hall, I could see her look up at him as if she wondered whether she'd done something wrong the first time. She held her head high, kept her ears alertly pricked up, and stared at Steve. She's a big bitch, mostly black, with tan legs and a light belly, a gorgeous shepherd and a genuine one-man dog. She doesn't like to have Steve out of her sight. Me neither.
"I think Stanton's had a coronary," I said when he reached me. "He's out on the lawn. Gerry's with him."
"Get me some light," he said. He's used to emergencies.
Normally, the only light at the armory entrance comes from a couple of bulbs over the front door. I wasn't sure that there were any more outside lights. If there were, I had no idea where to find the switches, so I followed Steve outside and relayed his request to Gerry. In spite of Gerry's forty surplus pounds, the absence of hair on his head, and the multiplicity of moles on his face, I had never thought of him as ugly, but as he brushed past me, he looked almost ghoulish.
The armory has, it turns out, huge outdoor floodlights, and, of course, Gerry knew where to find the switch. When the lights came on, I could see Dr. Stanton lying on his back on the grass, with Steve kneeling next to him. That kind of light isn't flattering to anyone, except possibly Steve, but Stanton's face was hideously distorted in some way I'd never seen before. Sprawled there under the floodlight, he looked like a rag doll wearing the kind of rubber Halloween mask that sensitive Cambridge parents try to prevent their children from buying at Irwin's Toy Store.
"Call an ambulance," Steve said. "And call the police. Someone's strangled him with Rowdy's leash."
If we'd been at a show, the leash would have been lying on the floor of the armory just in back of Rowdy, but if your dog gets up and starts to take off somewhere during a class, you want that leash where you can put your hands on it when you catch him. I knew exactly what had happened. Dr. Stanton had put the leash around his neck, left Rowdy, and walked outside. He'd stood on one side of the stairs, where it's dark, or, just maybe, he'd opened the gate and stepped onto the lawn. The lawn is not prohibited unless you have your dog with you. It is assumed that handlers won't exercise themselves there. Someone must have sneaked up on him, grabbed the leash, wrapped it all the way around his neck, and yanked hard.
Back inside, I called an ambulance and the police, and while I was calling, Ray and Lynne and a couple of other people overheard me, si
nce the pay phone's on a wall near the desk. It seemed like half a day since I'd gone to tell Dr. Stanton to release Rowdy, but it couldn't have been more than a few minutes, because Vince was just ending his class, and he's usually right on schedule.
"Everybody's got to stay here," Ray said, "and somebody's got to do something about the nine o'clock people."
I could hear the sound of voices and barking in the hall. A greasy-haired woman with a Portuguese water dog was leaning against the desk listening eagerly as she waited to check in. If you'd walked up to the armory and seen Steve and Gerry kneeling by Dr. Stanton or bending over him, and if you hadn’t seen his face, you'd have assumed, as many people did, that he was one of the men from the shelter, someone like Hal, a stranger who'd passed out from alcohol or hunger. Once the police arrived, nobody would continue to assume that.
The main reason we all stayed calm is that Vince and Roz were used to ordering us around, and we were used to obeying them. People say that the hardest part of training a dog is training the owner. Roz and Vince had done a good job with all of us. After hours of obeying them when they told us "Left turn," "Right turn," "About turn," and "Halt," we were ready to form a group at the far end of the hall when Vince ordered us to gather there, and the newcomers were ready to wait at the front of the hall when Roz stood at the door and directed them. Roz and Vince's expertise came in handy in another way, too. They'd both had to deal with runaway dogs, which are a serious matter in a building as close as the armory is to the traffic of Concord Avenue and the Fresh Pond rotary. Consequently, they were both carrying leashes. When Roz had seen that Dr. Stanton was not returning, she had put Rowdy on hers and had tied him to one of the bleachers at the far end of the hall.
People who believe in ESP like to think that dogs and their owners have special powers of communication, but if Rowdy had received some extrasensory message from Dr. Stanton, he wasn't showing any sign of it. Even though he knew that he was tied up, I think that he still believed he was on a long down, because he was in his favorite long-down posture, belly on the floor, forelegs crossed, head resting on them, tail sticking up and waving slowly. Rowdy often looked as if he were scanning for some kind of wonderful trouble and preparing to create some if he didn't find any soon enough to suit him. All malamutes are big dogs, but, at ninety pounds, Rowdy was about five pounds heavier than he should have been. Even though wolves are rangier than malamutes and have smaller, warier eyes, all malamutes, Rowdy included, look something like wolves, especially to people who've never seen real wolves up close. There is one big difference between wolves and malamutes besides the fact that malamutes carry their tails high. A wolf wants to avoid you. A malamute wants to lap your face and roll onto his back so you'll rub his tummy, and that rub-my-tummy look is the one Rowdy gave me when he caught my eye at the far end of the armory that night. An imploring look from the glittering dark-brown eyes of a beautiful dog, especially a dog that's just lost his owner, is not an easy thing to ignore.
If I had been with some other group of people, I'd probably have had to keep on talking about what had happened, but dog people understand one another. In the groups I like best, it's very common to find that everyone knows the names of all the dogs, while only a few people know other people's names. No one minds. I'm not hurt when someone forgets my name, but I expect people to know who my dogs are. Besides, I'd already told everyone everything I knew, which, at that point, was practically nothing, and if no one had done anything about Rowdy, the wail of the sirens out on Concord Avenue might have started him howling.
I knew that Rowdy wasn't the kind of dog you need to approach cautiously. "Okay," I said emphatically to him. "Okay, big dog."
He stood up, wagged his tail, shook himself, and made a throaty sound somewhere between a sigh and a question. I don't think he knew that Dr. Stanton was dead, but he did know that something strange was happening. I held his collar, unsnapped his leash, disentangled it from the bleacher, and snapped it onto his training collar. He helped by sniffing my ears, nuzzling my neck, and prancing around. I led him over to the others from the eight and eight-thirty classes. By then, he'd decided to adapt to whatever was going on by making himself the center of my attention. He threw me a questioning look, then suddenly flopped belly-up onto the grubby floor, tucked his head in, and curled his forepaws almost under his chin. He was asking me something: "Are you one of the good ones?" I knelt down and massaged his plump white stomach and his massive gray chest.
"You guessed it, buddy," I told him. "When it comes to dogs, I'm a real sap."
People were quiet, and most of the dogs, sensitive to the hushed tones, were subdued. Curly, the irrepressible exception, was pirouetting in front of Diane as if two or three cameras were trained on him. When I stood up, Rowdy reluctantly rolled over and got to his feet. Seeking comfort, nearly everyone had at least one hand on a dog. Ron Coughlin, who'd left the hall with Dr. Stanton, seemed to be the last person who'd seen him alive. Ron was saying that he'd gone to the men's room, and when he'd come out, the entrance hall was empty. He'd assumed that Stanton was outside, as usual.
"Oh, Jesus," Vince said. "There's Roger."
Dr. Stanton's wife had died about twenty years ago. He hadn't had any children. The closest he'd come to a relative was Roger Singer, his nephew, or, more precisely, his great-nephew. Every obedience club has at least one member whom God did not fashion as a dog handler. God did not so fashion Roger. God also makes exceptions to Winter's rule. It would be hard to mold a person more perfectly in the image of Lion, his Newfoundland, than Roger had already been molded, giant-sized and big-boned, with a large head and long black hair. I'd sometimes thought that if you entered Roger in a dog show as a Newfoundland, he'd win Best of Breed.
"I'll get him," said Ray, who'd been replaced at the desk by the Cambridge police. "I'll bet nobody's told him yet."
Ray went back to the desk. By then, the force was there in force, state police as well as Cambridge cops, because the armory is state property. I could see Ray talking with one of the cops at the desk, probably explaining who Roger was, and then I saw him lead Roger and Lion to one of the bleachers. I couldn't hear what they were saying, but Roger kept shaking his head and wiping tears away.
Diane and Lynne were talking about something I'd been thinking about as I was leashing Rowdy.
"It was that thin leather leash, wasn't it?" Diane asked me. Curly always wears a dainty red collar. His leash matches it.
"I didn't see it," I said. I hadn't wanted to look closely. "But it must have been."
Hermes, the Clumber spaniel Lynne had been training that night, was only nine months old. He'd gone to sleep at her feet with his eyes half open. "I asked him about that leash the other night," Lynne said quietly. "It was a new one. I wondered if it was strong enough. I mean, who was I to tell him he was using the wrong lead? But, anyway, I did."
The woman who spoke up next had gray permed curls and wore an Einstein sweatshirt with a Right to Life button pinned to the neckline. Her collie bitch is Princess. I can't remember the woman's name. "It was strong enough after all, wasn't it?" she said.
No one answered her. To anyone who loves dogs, the sensation of holding a leash is the next best thing to the feel of fur. Ever since I was punished at Sunday school for pointing out that "God" spelled backward is "dog," the only religious institution with which I've been affiliated is the American Kennel Club, but I feel the same spiritual comfort holding a leash that others feel holding a rosary. That's how I was raised. In my family, the dog was the sacred animal, like the cow in India. I started to think about how Vinnie's leash had felt when I cleaned it for the last time, and, with that memory, I started to cry, not for Vinnie but for Dr. Stanton and his big, rough dog. Or maybe I was crying for myself, or maybe for all of us. Until that night, this shabby armory had been the safest place in the world, my sanctuary. It certainly was the safest place in Cambridge, the one place where nothing bad could happen. Who'd attack you when you were protected by t
hirty or forty dogs? And the people were no threat. These were my people, the best people on earth. The armory was the one place in Cambridge where a woman could put down her purse and leave it unguarded. Unless you kept a Yorkshire terrier in your handbag, no one would look twice at it. And now some bastard had spoiled it.
The hardest hit was Barbara, who'd been Dr. Stanton's favorite. If liking frail-looking young women made him sexist, Margaret was right, but Barbara never objected, and when she wants to yell No at a dog, there's nothing frail about her voice. In our regular nine o'clock class, she and Dr. Stanton always trained next to each other. From a distance of more than twenty feet or so, he had trouble seeing Rowdy, and if we left the dogs for sits and downs, she'd keep an eye on Rowdy and let Dr. Stanton know when Rowdy started to move. In return, Dr. Stanton gave her advice she didn't need about Freda and her other German shepherds. Barbara's father died when she was twelve. Afterward, when I told Rita how upset Barbara was about Dr. Stanton, Rita said she had lost her refound object. Rita talks like that. Maybe all therapists do.
Roger, Dr. Stanton's nephew, looked numb and tearful, and lots of us were sad and frightened, but Barbara was the real mourner. She should have gone home, but we weren't allowed to leave. I'm glad she had Freda with her. In looks, Freda is a real contrast to India. She's on the small side for a shepherd, and she's mostly light tan with only a few dark markings on her face and back, but like India, she's amazingly sensitive and intuitive. That night, she melded herself to Barbara's left side, and her big, gentle eyes never left Barbara's face.
We must have hung around for at least an hour. A couple of officers took down our names and addresses. People smoked. The floor is so worn that its finish is completely gone, and in some places, the parquet has crumbled, so Gerry lets people smoke.
