Black Ribbon

by Susan Conant

  Or that’s how it’s supposed to be, and that’s how it was until Edwina reached the articles. After one cursory sniff, instead of going about her work, the little dog turned abruptly to face Phyllis and threw her a puzzled and almost startled look, as if to demand what new and weird training trick her handler was trying now. Eager not to interfere with Edwina’s work, Irma gave Phyllis a questioning glance. Phyllis shrugged her shoulders and kept watching Edwina, who was now circling the diminutive dumbbells and examining them in a normal, if somewhat suspicious, fashion. After twenty or thirty seconds, Edwina zeroed in on the correct article, a leather dumbbell, but she’d no sooner picked it up than she immediately dropped it. In fact, she didn’t just let it fall; she spat it out.

  “Something is very wrong,” said Phyllis, striding rapidly to the baffled and anxious-looking little dog, who was now scouring her muzzle with her tongue and coughing lightly, as if trying to rid her mouth of a bad taste. After speaking softly to Edwina, Phyllis kneeled on the ground, peered at the articles, and sniffed. Then Phyllis did the sensible, repulsive thing: She picked up one of the leather dumbbells and gave it a light lick. Her whole face puckered. Shaking with rage, she rose to her feet and addressed not only Irma but everyone else under the bright striped tent. “Someone,” she announced, “has tampered with my articles. They have been deliberately treated with some bitter substance. This is a vile thing to do to me, and it is a vile thing to do to my dog. And don’t you dare try and tell me that this is any accident!”

  IT HAD ALWAYS SEEMED to me that in the world of, ahem, literary endeavor, my fellow dog writers and I enjoyed the unique privilege of not having to work very hard at what we did. I’d felt particularly sorry for our human-writing brethren, cursed to sweat over so intractably complex a subject as human nature while we got to scribble and jot in effortless celebration of creatures who were simply wonderful. Every time I’d ever tried to plunge out of the genre and into the so-called mainstream of dogless fiction, my tedious human characters would sit around boring themselves and their creator until, against my will and sometimes theirs as well, a dog would suddenly vault in, dig its teeth into my story, and after a tug of war that I inevitably lost, drag me out of the mainstream, where I was drowning anyway, and back to the canine shores where I could breathe again. Years ago, desperate for cash to special a dog, I’d gotten halfway through writing a promisingly trashy and exclusively human romance novel, but then a golden retriever had leaped in and stolen the plot, and I’d given up the project as hopelessly unpublishable. But maybe I was wrong. Maybe there is, after all, more demand for canine romances than I dared to hope.

  I threw out the manuscript, but I still have the title, and that’s a start.

  Heartworms.

  All this is to say that at quarter of twelve on that same Monday morning, I sat at the little desk in my cabin, stared at a blank sheet of yellow legal pad, and realized that I had something in common with Phyllis and Edwina: Someone had contaminated my article and left a foul taste in my mouth. I reminded myself that all writing is selective. I rationalized: To write is inevitably to transform. I tried to silence my conscience with scraps of an Ogden Nash verse, something about sins of commission and sins of omission, but either Nash or my own sense of humor let me down. I tried to think that what I wrote didn’t really matter, because Bonnie would edit it anyway, and she’d certainly get rid of the pranks, the bad feeling, the gossip, even the loathsome Eva Spitteler.

  Immediately after Edwina’s unhappy encounter with what everyone suspected was Bitter Apple or a similar antichew product, while Phyllis, Jennifer, Irma, and a few others were discussing techniques for de-scenting scent articles, Eva had barged into the obedience tent, issued loud complaints about the doggy swimming lessons, permitted a wet Bingo to shake off all over everyone, tried and failed to get Chuck Siegel to give her an individual lesson, and then insisted that she and Bingo must do a Novice run-through. Bingo had a trial coming up, she said. Irma capitulated. With no help from Eva, Irma and a few volunteers cleared away the high jump and the bar jump. During the run-through, Irma made the same kinds of tactful suggestions and helpful observations that she’d made to everyone else and that everyone else had accepted with thanks. Eva, however, had already tried everything Irma suggested, wasn’t making the handler errors that Irma pointed out, didn’t like this approach, rejected that one, and otherwise made an obnoxious fool of herself.

  So if you can write up Eva Spitteler as an angel in dog heaven, go ahead. Also try the sympathy cards, so many of which had now appeared that they’d lost their shock value. Scary clippings also continued to appear. We already knew about canine illnesses, hazards in the home, and poisonous plants. We knew not to leave our dogs locked in airless cars on warm days, and we knew that the sweet taste of antifreeze made it an especially deadly threat. Throughout my late-morning course on canine first aid and CPR, I kept reminding myself that I protected my dogs from these and other dangers and that I either knew or was learning what to do if my precautions failed. When I practiced CPR on the canine mannequin, I made sure that I knew exactly where my hands belonged and how much force I’d need to use if Rowdy or Kimi ever lay as lifeless as the doggy dummy. Ginny, Cam, and I had a worrisome talk about bloat, for which there is, of course, no first aid. Once a dog’s abdomen starts to swell, all you can do is get to a vet. But not every vet knows how to perform the lifesaving surgery. All of us trusted our own vets. Here we felt suddenly unsafe, far from home. Everyone reminded everyone else always to soak dry food in water and never to exercise a dog just after a meal. That morning, I’d waited until after lure coursing to feed Rowdy. Even so, I listened hard to the reminders and warnings.

  After first aid, I’d let Rowdy go twice through the jump chute, which turned out to be a series of bar jumps set at equal intervals along the length of a narrow passageway formed by a tall, thorny hedge on one side and a hurricane fence on the other. The point of the activity, I thought, was to identify and correct jumping problems, especially bad habits that could eventually injure bones and joints. A couple of experts had already assessed Rowdy’s jumping for me, and the chute jumping instructor had confirmed their opinion that his form was excellent. But maybe it was Rowdy who’d gotten the real point: Leaping over jump after jump, he’d had a lot of fun.

  On the yellow pad, I scribbled, Jump chutes. Chute jumping? Fun. Brilliant start. I wasn’t even sure what the activity was called. I tore off the page, crumpled it up, threw it in the wastebasket, and began to block out the article about making life easy for judges by understanding the guidelines they had to follow. Sped by the sense of knowing what I was doing, I made swift progress. How, I asked, might exhibitors, stewards, and even spectators inadvertently put the judge in an awkward position? Without actually criticizing clubs for failing to train stewards, I reminded my readers that “under no circumstances may a judge look at a catalog until he has completed judging.” In the ring, dogs are, of course, identified only by the numbers of the handlers’ arm bands. The catalog would enable the judge to see the names of dogs, handlers, owners, and breeders, information that could bias judging. In reality, experienced breed judges didn’t actually need to see a catalog to know precisely who was who, but the ban on looking at the catalog was nonetheless an attempt to minimize politically motivated judging, and I approved of it. And what other options did the AKC have? Were handlers supposed to enter the ring masked and hooded? And what about readily recognizable dogs? If they, too, were disguised beyond recognition, how could anyone be expected to judge them? So, no catalogs anywhere near a judge, and no chitchat that could be misconstrued, either, nothing at all that might appear to bias the judge. Also, exhibitors had to avoid even the slightest appearance of doing the judge a big favor or giving material thanks that might be misconstrued as bribery. No dinners, no flowers, no candy, no liquor, no offer of bed and board, no ride from the airport or to the next show, either, nothing that could compromise the judge’s appearance of impartiality.
As I refrained from mentioning, the average judge doesn’t really care about such inducements, anyway; the real temptation to the typical judge is the prospect of more judging assignments, preferably at prestigious shows in attractive locations.

  Then I turned to judicial authority and, specifically, to the matter of what questions it was and was not all right to ask a judge. According to the AKC guidelines, conformation judges “should answer questions, but normally not about their placements and certainly not about a competitor.… Judges should never discuss the relative merits of another entry with a competing owner or handler.” Obedience judges are “allowed to engage in a discussion on an individual dog’s performance with its handler.” Forbidden to all judges is any conversation whatsoever with a disgruntled exhibitor. It is fine to request a judge’s opinion, but to question the opinion is to make it impossible for the judge to continue the conversation.

  I noticed the time, realized that I was ravenous, dropped my pen, rushed Rowdy out for a quick walk, crated him, and headed for the lodge. For once, there were few dogs and few people in sight. At the edge of the woods between my group of cabins and the bunkhouse, the sweet-tempered, long-haired Akita, Jacob, sniffed at a tree stump, lifted his leg, sniffed again, and, evidently satisfied, ambled along in apparent pursuit of new odors to cover. From the human end of Jacob’s flex lead, perhaps ten feet from the dog, Michael waved to me. I waved back. Pulling an additional five or six feet of the cordlike lead from the plastic case in Michael’s hand, Jacob followed an invisible trail along the rough ground. Patiently waiting, Michael stood still. If I remember correctly, he didn’t even move the hand that held the lead—he certainly didn’t try to reel Jacob in—and Jacob didn’t leap, lunge, or do anything else to strain the cord. To all appearances, it broke entirely on its own. I was amazed. I’d used those flex leads since they’d first appeared on the market, and so had almost every other dog person I knew, including other malamute people with untrained dogs that pulled even harder than mine did. We trusted those leads. You could crack and ruin one by dropping the plastic case on a hard surface; the unwary person who grabbed the cord got a terrible rope burn; and every now and then, the cord would get temporarily fouled up inside the case. But I’d never even heard of the cord, the lead itself, just breaking.

  My loose-dog instincts awakened, I got some liver from my pocket and walked smoothly toward Jacob, but as soon as Michael called, the big dog went right to him. When I reached them, Michael had Jacob by the collar. I didn’t really expect Michael to know why the lead had snapped. I asked anyway.

  “No idea.” He offered me the plastic case.

  I examined it. It looked exactly like the two I owned, except that the one I’d brought to camp bore a stripe of adhesive tape with “Winter” printed in black laundry marker. And mine wasn’t broken. Was it?

  “Have you dropped it?” I asked. “Has anything happened to it?”

  Michael shook his head.

  I said the obvious. “Jacob’s a powerful dog. Does he pull hard on it? Put any strain on it?” I don’t know why I asked. Kimi routinely strained my identical leads—same brand, same twenty-six-foot length—running around in circles, and she’d never seemed to do them any harm.

  “No. All I can think of is that something went wrong inside the case. There’s a spring in there.”

  When the lead had broken, Michael must have been too startled to press the trigger on the handle. The loose length of cord had retracted all the way inside the case. The other end was still attached to Jacob, a short length of ordinary flat nylon lead securely snapped to his collar, then the thin, strong cord, the part meant to retract inside the case. I followed it to its end, held it, stared at it, and wished that I knew something—anything at all—about how to tell whether a rope has simply broken or whether it’s been deliberately cut. To my ignorant eye, the cord showed no signs of wear. It certainly wasn’t frayed. Except at the end, where it had broken quite cleanly, it looked brand-new.

  “Michael,” I said quietly, “are you sure that this is your lead?”

  PROPPED ON AN EASEL at the entrance to the dining room was a cork bulletin board. It displayed a big, bright advertisement for the camp store, an amateurish but enthusiastic-looking reminder about Canine Good Citizen testing, and an unobtrusive announcement of the cancellation of two other events scheduled for the afternoon, something called “Terrier Fun,” and a workshop on spinning and weaving dog hair. I didn’t really mind missing either. For all I knew, Terrier Fun consisted of coaching bold little scrappers in new and yet more senseless ways to take on malamutes. As for spinning and weaving, Rowdy and Kimi undoubtedly had a greater aptitude for producing the raw material than I did for fashioning it into garments in which anyone might want to be seen. Also tacked to the board was a sheet of white paper that proclaimed in the emphatic red capitals of a felt-tipped pen: “UNSUPERVISED USE OF THE AGILITY AREA IS STRICTLY FORBIDDEN!”

  As I started to enter the dining room, Maxine came up in back of me and demanded, “Didn’t you just love agility?”

  Mindful of my instructions from Bonnie, Max’s dear friend, I compliantly said that indeed, Rowdy and I had both loved agility and that, if anything, he was having even more fun than I was. That latter part of my remark was perfectly true. The rawhide bone in the tunnel had been an outright treat. Neither the sympathy cards nor the casket and headstone ads nor the scary clippings about dangers and diseases nor Jacob’s broken lead had bothered Rowdy at all. He wouldn’t have liked having his own scent articles treated with Bitter Apple, but a nasty taste in another dog’s mouth was no concern of his.

  “It’s so marvelous,” said Max, “to watch all my dreams becoming a reality.”

  All my dreams becoming a reality? Ever since Rita and I became friends, it has often occurred to me that the average nonpsychotherapeutic person—myself, for instance—lives in what sometimes feels like unremitting need of Rita’s professional advice. I seldom have trouble telling whether someone is cracking up; all too often, the break is disconcertingly obvious. What I never know is how I’m supposed to respond. Lacking professional training, I fall back on lies. “It must be wonderful,” I told Max. If I’d been Rita, and Max had walked into my office and said that camp was going great, I’d probably have made exactly the same reply.

  As I was wondering whether any of the medications in Rowdy’s first-aid kit would do as a reality-sharpener for human beings, Eva Spitteler waddled up, planted herself in front of Max and me, and, feet spread, arms akimbo, began to tell Max almost everything I’d kept to myself. “I can take a joke with the best of them,” Eva began, “but some of the shit that’s going on around here is no joke. Take this.” She rummaged around in the pocket of her shorts and produced yet another of the sympathy cards, this one heavily dusted with the residue of dog treats. “It was shoved under my door, and I don’t like that one damn bit, and all the other shit about dog funerals and bloat and all that other crap is goddamn depressing; and then on top of it, half of what was in your brochure has been canceled, or it’s just sort of disappeared between the time I sent you a fat check and the time I got here. Like tracking. Tracking’s not some kind of an obscure thing to do with a dog, and it’s in the brochure, and I show up here all ready to get Bingo started tracking, and I’ve got a tracking lead and tracking harness, and I look over the schedule, and well, well, big surprise! No tracking. And instead of advanced obedience, everyone’s lumped together, and the whole idea was that we get to try everything, and everyone’s giving me this shit about staying with what I started and not moving around; and every time I turn around, someone’s yelling at me about scooping up poop, and I have really had it! Because I did not pay all this money and drive all this way to spend a week sitting around and cleaning up dog shit!”

  With that, Eva stomped through the French doors that led to the dining room.

  “Her mother,” Maxine remarked placidly, “should’ve taken one look and culled that one.”

  Cull.
In one sense, every breeder does it: separates out the puppies with obvious faults and problems. In another sense, an ethical breeder does it rarely: immediately destroys those pups, the culls. Any good breeder spares a hopelessly sick puppy the agony of incurable illness or pain, and any good breeder removes the culls from the gene pool. A few breeders still follow what used to be a rather common practice of euthanizing any puppy with a show fault: a malamute with a mismark, an Akita with a coat like Jacob’s. Neutered, as Jacob was, he obviously couldn’t pass along the undesirable trait to any offspring. What a dog like that could do, though, was to advertise the presence of the trait in his breeder’s line, announce to other breeders that so-and-so’s dogs produced long coats, and maybe make breeders reluctant to pay hefty stud fees. I shrugged my shoulders, excused myself, and entered the dining room.

  The unappetizing nature of my preprandial reflections was probably just as well because spread out on a long buffet table was what extensive experience in helping out at dog shows immediately led me to identify as the stewards’ lunch—cold cuts, Swiss cheese, thin slices of pale tomatoes, iceberg lettuce, mayonnaise, primary-yellow mustard, soft bread, and squishy rolls—as opposed to the officials’ lunch—chicken, say, or roast beef sandwiches—and certainly as opposed to the exalted feast of something like lobster salad or the plate of something hot and delicious that every judge has the right to expect. We, however—or they, the nonscholarship campers—had paid judges’ prices. I filled my plate. The stewards’ lunch was what I was used to, anyway. What really would have spoiled it would have been trying to swallow it in the presence of Eva Spitteler. I glanced around and saw her settling her wide bottom in a chair next to Eric Grimaldi’s at a table in the far corner of the dining room. Eric was sitting right in the corner, and Eva had every appearance of intending to keep him there. As I turned to look for a seat far away from Eva, Cam White appeared at my side. She murmured, “Wasting her time. Where are you sitting?”