by John Grogan
I threw one of the sticks out into the water and he raced after it, yelping madly as he went. He returned a new, wiser opponent. This time he was cautious and refused to come anywhere near me. He stood about ten yards away, stick in mouth, eying the new object of his desire, which just happened to be the old object of his desire, his first stick, now perched high above my head. I could see the cogs moving again. He was thinking, This time I’ll just wait right here until he throws it, and then he’ll have no sticks and I’ll have both sticks. “You think I’m really dumb, don’t you, dog,” I said. I heaved back and with a great, exaggerated groan hurled the stick with all my might. Sure enough, Marley roared into the water with his stick still locked in his teeth. The only thing was, I hadn’t let go of mine. Do you think Marley figured that out? He swam halfway to Palm Beach before catching on that the stick was still in my hand.
“You’re cruel!” Jenny yelled down from her bench, and I looked back to see she was laughing.
When Marley finally got back onshore, he plopped down in the sand, exhausted but not about to give up his stick. I showed him mine, reminding him how far superior it was to his, and ordered, “Drop it!” I cocked my arm back as if to throw, and the dummy bolted back to his feet and began heading for the water again. “Drop it!” I repeated when he returned. It took several tries, but finally he did just that. And the instant his stick hit the sand, I launched mine into the air for him. We did it over and over, and each time he seemed to understand the concept a little more clearly. Slowly the lesson was sinking into that thick skull of his. If he returned his stick to me, I would throw a new one for him. “It’s like an office gift exchange,” I told him. “You’ve got to give to get.” He leaped up and smashed his sandy mouth against mine, which I took to be an acknowledgment of a lesson learned.
As Jenny and I walked home, the tuckered Marley for once did not strain against his leash. I beamed with pride at what we had accomplished. For weeks Jenny and I had been working to teach him some basic social skills and manners, but progress had been painfully slow. It was like we were living with a wild stallion—and trying to teach it to sip tea from fine porcelain. Some days I felt like Anne Sullivan to Marley’s Helen Keller. I thought back to Saint Shaun and how quickly I, a mere ten-year-old boy, had been able to teach him all he needed to know to be a great dog. I wondered what I was doing wrong this time.
But our little fetching exercise offered a glimmer of hope. “You know,” I said to Jenny, “I really think he’s starting to get it.”
She looked down at him, plodding along beside us. He was soaking wet and coated in sand, spittle foaming on his lips, his hard-won stick still clenched in his jaws. “I wouldn’t be so sure of that,” she said.
The next morning I again awoke before dawn to the sounds of Jenny softly sobbing beside me. “Hey,” I said, and wrapped my arms around her. She nestled her face against my chest, and I could feel her tears soaking through my T-shirt.
“I’m fine,” she said. “Really. I’m just—you know.”
I did know. I was trying to be the brave soldier, but I felt it, too, the dull sense of loss and failure. It was odd. Less than forty-eight hours earlier we had been bubbling with anticipation over our new baby. And now it was as if there had never been a pregnancy at all. As if the whole episode was just a dream from which we were having trouble waking.
Later that day I took Marley with me in the car to pick up a few groceries and some things Jenny needed at the pharmacy. On the way back, I stopped at a florist shop and bought a giant bouquet of spring flowers arranged in a vase, hoping they would cheer her up. I strapped them into the seat belt in the backseat beside Marley so they wouldn’t spill. As we passed the pet shop, I made the split-second decision that Marley deserved a pick-me-up, too. After all, he had done a better job than I at comforting the inconsolable woman in our lives. “Be a good boy!” I said. “I’ll be right back.” I ran into the store just long enough to buy an oversized rawhide chew for him.
When we got home a few minutes later, Jenny came out to meet us, and Marley tumbled out of the car to greet her. “We have a little surprise for you,” I said. But when I reached in the backseat for the flowers, the surprise was on me. The bouquet was a mix of white daisies, yellow mums, assorted lilies, and bright red carnations. Now, however, the carnations were nowhere to be found. I looked more closely and found the decapitated stems that minutes earlier had held blossoms. Nothing else in the bouquet was disturbed. I glared at Marley and he was dancing around like he was auditioning for Soul Train. “Get over here!” I yelled, and when I finally caught him and pried open his jaws, I found the incontrovertible evidence of his guilt. Deep in his cavernous mouth, tucked up in one jowl like a wad of chewing tobacco, was a single red carnation. The others presumably were already down the hatch. I was ready to murder him.
I looked up at Jenny and tears were streaming down her cheeks. But this time, they were tears of laughter. She could not have been more amused had I flown in a mariachi band for a private serenade. There was nothing left for me to do but laugh, too.
“That dog,” I muttered.
“I’ve never been crazy about carnations anyway,” she said.
Marley was so thrilled to see everyone happy and laughing again that he jumped up on his hind legs and did a break dance for us.
The next morning, I awoke to bright sun dappling through the branches of the Brazilian pepper tree and across the bed. I glanced at the clock; it was nearly eight. I looked over at my wife sleeping peacefully, her chest rising and falling with long, slow breaths. I kissed her hair, draped an arm across her waist, and closed my eyes again.
CHAPTER 8
A Battle of Wills
W hen Marley was not quite six months old, we signed him up for obedience classes. God knew he needed it. Despite his stick-fetching breakthrough on the beach that day, he was proving himself a challenging student, dense, wild, constantly distracted, a victim of his boundless nervous energy. We were beginning to figure out that he wasn’t like other dogs. As my father put it shortly after Marley attempted marital relations with his knee, “That dog’s got a screw loose.” We needed professional help.
Our veterinarian told us about a local dog-training club that offered basic obedience classes on Tuesday nights in the parking lot behind the armory. The teachers were unpaid volunteers from the club, serious amateurs who presumably had already taken their own dogs to the heights of advanced behavior modification. The course ran eight lessons and cost fifty dollars, which we thought was a bargain, especially considering that Marley could destroy fifty dollars’ worth of shoes in thirty seconds. And the club all but guaranteed we’d be marching home after graduation with the next great Lassie. At registration we met the woman who would be teaching our class. She was a stern, no-nonsense dog trainer who subscribed to the theory that there are no incorrigible dogs, just weak-willed and hapless owners.
The first lesson seemed to prove her point. Before we were fully out of the car, Marley spotted the other dogs gathering with their owners across the tarmac. A party! He leaped over us and out of the car and was off in a tear, his leash dragging behind him. He darted from one dog to the next, sniffing private parts, dribbling pee, and flinging huge wads of spit through the air. For Marley it was a festival of smells—so many genitals, so little time—and he was seizing the moment, being careful to stay just ahead of me as I raced after him. Each time I was nearly upon him, he would scoot a few feet farther away. I finally got within striking distance and took a giant leap, landing hard with both feet on his leash. This brought him to a jolting halt so abrupt that for a moment I thought I might have broken his neck. He jerked backward, landed on his back, flipped around, and gazed up at me with the serene expression of a heroin addict who had just gotten his fix.
Meanwhile, the instructor was staring at us with a look that could not have been more withering had I decided to throw off my clothes and dance naked right there on the blacktop. “Take your place, pleas
e,” she said curtly, and when she saw both Jenny and me tugging Marley into position, she added: “You are going to have to decide which of you is going to be trainer.” I started to explain that we both wanted to participate so each of us could work with him at home, but she cut me off. “A dog,” she said definitively, “can only answer to one master.” I began to protest, but she silenced me with that glare of hers—I suppose the same glare she used to intimidate her dogs into submission—and I slinked off to the sidelines with my tail between my legs, leaving Master Jenny in command.
This was probably a mistake. Marley was already considerably stronger than Jenny and knew it. Miss Dominatrix was only a few sentences into her introduction on the importance of establishing dominance over our pets when Marley decided the standard poodle on the opposite side of the class deserved a closer look. He lunged off with Jenny in tow.
All the other dogs were sitting placidly beside their masters at tidy ten-foot intervals, awaiting further instructions. Jenny was fighting valiantly to plant her feet and bring Marley to a halt, but he lumbered on unimpeded, tugging her across the parking lot in pursuit of hot-poodle butt-sniffing action. My wife looked amazingly like a water-skier being towed behind a powerboat. Everyone stared. Some snickered. I covered my eyes.
Marley wasn’t one for formal introductions. He crashed into the poodle and immediately crammed his nose between her legs. I imagined it was the canine male’s way of asking, “So, do you come here often?”
After Marley had given the poodle a full gynecological examination, Jenny was able to drag him back into place. Miss Dominatrix announced calmly, “That, class, is an example of a dog that has been allowed to think he is the alpha male of his pack. Right now, he’s in charge.” As if to drive home the point, Marley attacked his tail, spinning wildly, his jaws snapping at thin air, and in the process he wrapped the leash around Jenny’s ankles until she was fully immobilized. I winced for her, and gave thanks that it wasn’t me out there.
The instructor began running the class through the sit and down commands. Jenny would firmly order, “Sit!” And Marley would jump up on her and put his paws on her shoulders. She would press his butt to the ground, and he would roll over for a belly rub. She would try to tug him into place, and he would grab the leash in his teeth, shaking his head from side to side as if he were wrestling a python. It was too painful to watch. At one point I opened my eyes to see Jenny lying on the pavement facedown and Marley standing over her, panting happily. Later she told me she was trying to show him the down command.
As class ended and Jenny and Marley rejoined me, Miss Dominatrix intercepted us. “You really need to get control over that animal,” she said with a sneer. Well, thank you for that valuable advice. And to think we had signed up simply to provide comic relief for the rest of the class. Neither of us breathed a word. We just retreated to the car in humiliation and drove home in silence, the only sound Marley’s loud panting as he tried to come down from the high of his first structured classroom experience. Finally I said, “One thing you can say for him, he sure loves school.”
The next week Marley and I were back, this time without Jenny. When I suggested to her that I was probably the closest thing to an alpha dog we were going to find in our home, she gladly relinquished her brief title as master and commander and vowed to never show her face in public again. Before leaving the house, I flipped Marley over on his back, towered over him, and growled in my most intimidating voice, “I’m the boss! You’re not the boss! I’m the boss! Got it, Alpha Dog?” He thumped his tail on the floor and tried to gnaw on my wrists.
The night’s lesson was walking on heel, one I was especially keen on mastering. I was tired of fighting Marley every step of every walk. He already had yanked Jenny off her feet once when he took off after a cat, leaving her with bloody knees. It was time he learned to trot placidly along by our sides. I wrestled him to our spot on the tarmac, yanking him back from every dog we passed along the way. Miss Dominatrix handed each of us a short length of chain with a steel ring welded to each end. These, she told us, were choker collars and would be our secret weapons for teaching our dogs to heel effortlessly at our sides. The choker chain was brilliantly simple in design. When the dog behaved and walked beside its master as it was supposed to, with slack in its lead, the chain hung limply around its neck. But if the dog lunged forward or veered off course, the chain tightened like a noose, choking the errant hound into gasping submission. It didn’t take long, our instructor promised, before dogs learned to submit or die of asphyxia. Wickedly delicious, I thought.
I started to slip the choker chain over Marley’s head, but he saw it coming and grabbed it in his teeth. I pried his jaw open to pull it out and tried again. He grabbed it again. All the other dogs had their chains on; everyone was waiting. I grabbed his muzzle with one hand and with the other tried to lasso the chain over his snout. He was pulling backward, trying to get his mouth open so he could attack the mysterious coiled silver snake again. I finally forced the chain over his head, and he dropped to the ground, thrashing and snapping, his paws in the air, his head jerking from side to side, until he managed to get the chain in his teeth again. I looked up at the teacher. “He likes it,” I said.
As instructed, I got Marley to his feet and got the chain out of his mouth. Then, as instructed, I pushed his butt down into a sit position and stood beside him, my left leg brushing his right shoulder. On the count of three, I was to say, “Marley, heel!” and step off with my left—never my right—foot. If he began to wander off course, a series of minor corrections—sharp little tugs on the leash—would bring him back into line. “Class, on the count of three,” Miss Dominatrix called out. Marley was quivering with excitement. The shiny foreign object around his neck had him in a complete lather. “One…two…three.”
“Marley, heel!” I commanded. As soon as I took my first step, he took off like a fighter jet from an aircraft carrier. I yanked back hard on the leash and he made an awful coughing gasp as the chain tightened around his airway. He sprang back for an instant, but as soon as the chain loosened, the momentary choking was behind him, ancient history in that tiny compartment of his brain dedicated to life lessons learned. He lunged forward again. I yanked back and he gasped once more. We continued like this the entire length of the parking lot, Marley yanking ahead, me yanking back, each time with increasing vigor. He was coughing and panting; I was grunting and sweating.
“Rein that dog in!” Miss Dominatrix yelled. I tried to with all my might, but the lesson wasn’t sinking in, and I considered that Marley just might strangle himself before he figured it out. Meanwhile, the other dogs were prancing along at their owners’ sides, responding to minor corrections just as Miss Dominatrix said they would. “For God’s sake, Marley,” I whispered. “Our family pride is on the line.”
The instructor had the class queue up and try it again. Once again, Marley lurched his way manically across the blacktop, eyes bulging, strangling himself as he went. At the other end, Miss Dominatrix held Marley and me up to the class as an example of how not to heel a dog. “Here,” she said impatiently, holding out her hand. “Let me show you.” I handed the leash to her, and she efficiently tugged Marley around into position, pulling up on the choker as she ordered him to sit. Sure enough, he sank back on his haunches, eagerly looking up at her. Damn.
With a smart yank of the lead, Miss Dominatrix set off with him. But almost instantly he barreled ahead as if he were pulling the lead sled in the Iditarod. The instructor corrected hard, pulling him off balance; he stumbled, wheezed, then lunged forward again. It looked like he was going to pull her arm out of its socket. I should have been embarrassed, but I felt an odd sort of satisfaction that often comes with vindication. She wasn’t having any more success than I was. My classmates snickered, and I beamed with perverse pride. See, my dog is awful for everyone, not just me!
Now that I wasn’t the one being made the fool, I had to admit, the scene was pretty hilarious. The two o
f them, having reached the end of the parking lot, turned and came lurching back toward us in fits and starts, Miss Dominatrix scowling with what clearly was apoplectic rage, Marley joyous beyond words. She yanked furiously at the leash, and Marley, frothing at the mouth, yanked back harder still, clearly enjoying this excellent new tug-of-war game his teacher had called on him to demonstrate. When he caught sight of me, he hit the gas. With a near-supernatural burst of adrenaline, he made a dash for me, forcing Miss Dominatrix to break into a sprint to keep from being pulled off her feet. Marley didn’t stop until he slammed into me with his usual joie de vivre. Miss Dominatrix shot me a look that told me I had crossed some invisible line and there would be no crossing back. Marley had made a mockery of everything she preached about dogs and discipline; he had publicly humiliated her. She handed the leash back to me and, turning to the class as if this unfortunate little episode had never occurred, said, “Okay, class, on the count of three…”
When the lesson was over, she asked if I could stay after for a minute. I waited with Marley as she patiently fielded questions from other students in the class. When the last one had left, she turned to me and, in a newly conciliatory voice, said, “I think your dog is still a little young for structured obedience training.”
“He’s a handful, isn’t he?” I said, feeling a new camaraderie with her now that we’d shared the same humiliating experience.
“He’s simply not ready for this,” she said. “He has some growing up to do.”
