Black Ribbon

by Susan Conant

  “Let her keep it,” Janet advised him. “It’s her prize. For now, just let her keep it.”

  Prancing at the end of her lead, the triumphant Elsa, her catch in her mouth, led Eric to the end of the line. They wouldn’t have long to wait. Mainly because of Eva Spitteler’s presence, I suspected, their group was small.

  While I’d been watching Elsa and preventing Rowdy from finding out whether she’d share that tennis ball with him, Phyllis and Nigel had taken their turn, with what success I don’t know.

  “And now the malamute!” Betsy called. “Let’s see what the malamute can do! What his name? Rowdy? Bring Rowdy up here. All you want to do for right now is get him to get those big paws down here.” She pointed to the carpeted pedal that ran across the front of the box. “Can you get him to jump? Bounce around? All we’re after now is just getting him to hit it by accident.”

  Persuading a malamute to clown around isn’t exactly difficult. With the big plastic handle of the retractable lead in one hand, I had a little trouble clapping my hands, but my effort, in combination with a lot of excited chitchat, got Rowdy going, and within a few seconds, his forepaws had landed on the pedal and sent a ball flying out of the back of the machine. Clowning around is a virtually universal passion in the breed; retrieving isn’t. With Rowdy and Kimi, I’d lucked out. Besides, a lifetime with golden retrievers had trained me to expect demonic fetching from all dogs, and, in part, Rowdy and Kimi had done what I’d expected. When the tennis ball flew, Rowdy took a second to notice it, but then zoomed after it. After a late start, he failed to catch it in midair, but happily snapped it up as it rolled across the grass. When I led Rowdy back to the flyball box and made a big happy fuss that caused him accidentally to whack the pedal, he caught the ball before it hit the ground. Our turn was up. Like Elsa, Rowdy kept the ball he’d caught, and like her, he paraded back to the end of our queue with his prize in his jaws.

  As it happens, I have a photograph taken at the exact moment that Rowdy and I took our place at the end of the line. Craig, who took the picture, must have stepped far back to snap it. On the right, Betsy is loading the arm of the flyball box with a tennis ball. Jacob, first in line, is peering at Michael, who is pointing at the box. Michael’s mouth is open; he is talking to his dog, trying to entice Jacob toward the pedal. Some of the handlers in back of them are people I remember. Mary wears a cobalt blue Waggin’ Tail sweatshirt; Carole, a red anorak. The husband and wife with the English setters are there, the dogs even more handsome in the photograph than in my memory. Baskerville is yawning. Joy has on a fuzzy pink jacket, and adorning her blond curls is a matching pink bow suitable for a child. She kneels down, one arm around Lucky, her hand under the dog’s chin to tilt it toward the camera. She is posing; the odd smile on her half-open mouth suggests that Craig may have caught her as she was uttering cheese or pickles or one of those other words superstitiously believed to confer temporary photogenicity on the pronouncer. Joy does not, however, need to order lunch to look lovely; in the eye of the lens, Craig’s eye, she radiates a bride’s beauty. Phyllis Abbott’s face is turned away, and Joy’s body completely blocks the camera’s view of Nigel. At the end of the line, at the extreme left of the picture, I am grinning foolishly at Rowdy, who has noticed the camera. Oblivious to the unfortunate state of his coat, he has spontaneously stacked himself for the show ring. As if to brag of his recent accomplishment, he holds his head high and prominently displays the tennis ball in his mouth. My hair looks even worse than Rowdy’s coat. His display of pride is unabashed, deliberate. Mine is unintended and entirely unself-conscious. Indeed, I am conscious only of Rowdy and of a thought that is crossing my mind—an unusual thought to cross the mind of any writer, I might add—the thought that—wow!—my editor was right. Bonnie’s prediction was merely that and not a calculated injunction after all: I do love camp. And Rowdy loves it even more than I do. We are happy. We miss what the camera saw. Toward the right of the photograph, in the background, a big-boned yellow Lab leaps for a ball.

  But the camera does not see all. Or does it? In the picture, Bingo seems to be off lead. He was not. But he might as well have been. A Labrador retriever, young and healthy, if rather beefy, went hard after the ball. And then? I am forced to reconstruct. Eager to let Bingo follow the ball, Eva let him pull out the cord of the retractable lead. Too unfit or too lazy to keep up with her athletic dog, she remained where she was as the cord fed out. By the time I looked, Bingo was twenty feet away from her. At that point, I think, Eva finally pressed the trigger on the plastic handle and hit the little gadget that locks the retracting mechanism in place. His lead suddenly tight, Bingo gave a jolt, then a lunge that tore the handle out of Eva’s hands. With its mechanism locked to prevent the cord from retracting, the whole device, handle and twenty feet of thin cord, dragged after Bingo as he began what he must have meant as a game of catch-me-if-you-can. Glancing back at Eva, the tennis ball still in his mouth, he sped headlong and unseeing toward the line of experienced flyball dogs. That he collided with another Lab, Wiz, and with his own breeder, Ginny Garabedian, was a simple accident. Bingo, I am convinced, never intended to knock Ginny to the ground. But mounting Wiz was no accident. Although a gentle, docile creature, the chocolate Lab was nonetheless a female not in season and thus a lady unconditionally unreceptive to the amorous advances of any male. Besides, poor Wiz was terrified. Much smaller than Bingo, unexpectedly jumped, Wiz did her best to fight him off. Clambering to her feet, her face smeared with dirt, Ginny drew on the strength conferred by decades of training, handling, showing, breeding, and just plain bossing around Labrador retrievers. By then, I’d joined the crowd that surrounded the melee. Like almost everyone else who witnessed Ginny’s rescue of Wiz, I had the impression that her principal weapon was a tone of voice that brooked no argument. When the crowd around her cleared, Ginny had Bingo sitting really quite nicely at her left side. Having somehow caught hold of the plastic handle of his lead, she held it firmly, the cord now shortened to a few feet. On what looked like a reliable down-stay a yard or so away, Wiz eyed Ginny with well-earned trust.

  Making her way through the curious handlers and excited dogs, Eva Spitteler approached Ginny. She reached out for Bingo’s lead.

  “Sorry about that,” Eva blithely told Ginny. “But Bingo just loves the girls.”

  ONE LEAN ELBOW cocked on the bar, Ginny Garabedian spoke firmly: “A Bombay martini straight up with a twist of peel.” The spinsterish braid coiled around her head suggested the occasional indulgence in a drop of sweet sherry as a daring alternative to tea. A real bartender wouldn’t have blinked. This fellow gaped. I hoped that he stayed away from high-stakes poker.

  Impatient, Ginny demanded, “You do have Bombay gin?”

  “I think so,” the bartender stammered. Recovering, he offered to check. I wanted to inform him that Ginny had outlived five husbands.

  “Please do that,” Ginny said. “If not, Beefeater’s will do. And that’s straight up with a twist.”

  I ordered a drink I didn’t want, a Johnnie Walker Black on the rocks. I wondered why I’d done it. Rita, my therapist friend and tenant, owns so many books that I sometimes wonder how her floor and my ceiling support them. In Cambridge, though, owning a trillion pounds of books is so typical that the building code probably has some special provision designed to protect the citizenry from what would otherwise be daily episodes of lower-floor dwellers being buried like avalanche victims under the descending libraries of their upstairs neighbors. Anyway, I haven’t read many of Rita’s books, but sometimes their titles stick with me. The one I thought of was called The Group Mind. Maybe it dealt with this compulsion to order Scotch when all I wanted was a glass of red wine.

  When the drinks arrived, we carried them to a little table in a corner of what the resort billed as “The Pub,” a room off the big main hall furnished with rustic-looking Rangeley-style furniture, tables and chairs made of white birch with the peeling bark left on. As Ginny set her glass on our
table, she said, “I hardly ever drink martinis, but I am so mad I could spit.” Without so much as a cheers, she took a greedy sip, licked her lips, and forcibly exhaled. “Harry had Saint Bernards. He never put barrels around their necks, naturally, but if he had, this is what would’ve been in them. That’s why my kennels are so big, because a lot of them, Harry built for his dogs.”

  I’d never seen Ginny with any breed but a Lab. After Harry’s death, what had she done with the Saint Bernards that had failed to tote Bombay gin? I didn’t ask. I tasted my Johnnie Walker. One real slug and I’d be asking Ginny how many litters she bred a year and whether she ever permitted visitors to see the kennels where Harry’s Saints had trod.

  Before I had a chance to ask anything, Ginny transferred her glass to her left hand, made a tight little fist with her right, and punched the air. “Eva Spitteler is not allowed to breed that dog without my written permission. It’s right there in my contract.”

  Reputable breeders have what always strikes me as a touching faith in the power of signed contracts to regulate the behavior of puppy buyers. Breeders rewrite those contracts, add new clauses, and explain all the provisions to all their puppy buyers. According to the typical contract, the buyer promises to take great care of the dog, swears to get the breeder’s permission before breeding the dog, or, in the case of pet-quality puppies, promises to have the pup spayed or neutered. If the owner ever decides to get rid of the dog, the animal returns to the breeder. A few breeders add special requirements: The dog lives in the house, and once a week, he has a bath and gets his nails trimmed. The hitch? Envision the diligent breeder who, in the course of her weekly visits to the homes of every puppy she’s ever sold, is shocked to discover that whereas all her other buyers have been following her contract to the letter, young Fido’s owners have reneged on the promise to trim his nails and, indeed, report themselves unable to wield the trimmers themselves and unwilling to pay a groomer to do so. Can you hear it in court? Moral: A contract is no better than the breeder’s ability to monitor and enforce it. So what’s a breeder to do? About nail trimming, nothing. About breeding?

  I spoke hesitantly. “You didn’t think about limited registration?” A limited registration wouldn’t have prevented Bingo from pouncing on bitches, but in making his offspring ineligible for AKC registration, it would sure have neutered Eva’s breeding plans.

  “Well, of course, now I wish I had, but I have … had, I should say … Well, I still have a hard time shaking the idea that when you buy a dog, you buy him. And I know. Limited registration doesn’t change that. But I’ve just never done it that way.” Liquor and anger, which should have aged Ginny, had had the reverse effect: Her eyes were clear, her expression unguarded, her face fresh.

  “Ginny, you ever thought about trying to buy Bingo back?”

  Ginny drained her glass and ordered another martini. “Let me count the ways. I started offering half the purchase price. Then the full purchase price. After this mess at flyball, I even said I’d give her double.”

  “And?”

  “And I will not repeat what she said. Obscenity is one thing that has no place in dogs.” Unspoken words formed on Ginny’s lips. When she spoke again, she said, “You know, Holly, that was a lovely, lovely puppy. It makes me sick to see him so fat, and I know he’s not getting any exercise—look at him! And it would be bad enough if she left him home, but every time she takes him anywhere, I feel like crawling into the ground. You know what it’s like! Eva lets him get away with murder, and then all everyone says is, well, he came from my breeding. Have you ever seen one of my dogs act like that?”

  “Never,” I said. “But you’re right. People are going to say that. They always do. Instead of always asking ‘Where did he come from?’ they ought to stop and think about where he went and what’s happened to him. They should, but they hardly ever do.” And that’s the truth. The only people in this country who take even more unfair blame than mothers do are diligent, ethical, hardworking breeders of purebred dogs.

  I was saying as much to Ginny as we left The Pub and entered the main hall, where hungry campers were filing into the dining room. Stuck in the bottleneck, I glanced at the bulletin board, still propped on its easel. Prominently displayed at the top was a copy of Waggin’ Tail’s release and waiver of liability. In the ones mailed to us, however, the sentences about Maxine’s right to expel a camper for almost any reason had not been highlighted in bright yellow. The board had another change. The announcement of CGC testing had been replaced by a big red-lettered list of the new Canine Good Citizens and their presumably proud owners.

  Stepping up behind me, Heather, our Chief Fecal Inspector, murmured, “What bullshit! Passed! Bought it is more like it.”

  As the line moved, Heather expanded on the topic by citing examples of dogs that finished their AKC championships because their owners hired professional handlers and entered the dogs hundreds of times, if necessary, until the judges got so sick of looking at the same awful dogs that they put them up just so they’d never have to see them again. As I was about to pipe up in defense of judges, Eva Spitteler came barging up, shoved ahead of me, and accosted Ginny with, of all things, the suggestion that they sit together at dinner.

  “Miss Social Skills,” I whispered to Heather, who grimaced. At a normal pitch, I said, “Look, I agree that titles shouldn’t be up for sale, and, yes, there are a few people who abuse the system—”

  Before I could finish, Eva butted in. “A few? The whole thing stinks. Hey, Holly, you ever thought about writing about that business with fixing gay tails? Because if you ever want to do it, I can tell you—”

  As I’ve admitted, my Danny had a gay tail, one that’s carried above the horizontal, a position that’s fine in some breeds, faulty in others. The malamute’s glorious over-the-back plume could, I suppose, be considered the ultimate in canine caudal gaiety, but the dog person who says “gay tail” is usually talking about a golden retriever or maybe a Chesapeake with a tail carried too high for the breed standard. As published exposés had reported, a few sleazeball professional handlers would perform surgical butchery to correct the fault; and according to widely-circulated rumors, so would a few AKC judges. They’d do it for less than a vet would charge, and they’d leave no written record, of course. Anesthesia? Hey, forget it. After all, these are just dogs we’re talking about, right? Show dogs, which is to say, objects brought into this world to do one and only one thing, and that’s win, win, win.

  “People have written about that before,” I told Eva. “I’ve heard rumors—so has everyone else—but you can’t publish rumors.”

  Eva leaned so close to my ear that for a crazy second, I thought she meant to kiss me. “Eric Grimaldi,” she whispered. “Eric Grimaldi.”

  Almost like a vision, Elsa’s image appeared to me, the joy in her eyes, the beautiful head, the deep chest, the powerful shoulders and hindquarters, the whole put-together look of a very typey bitch, and that ultra-Chesapeake expression that always seems to me to indicate an exceedingly high and perfectly justified regard for the intelligence and judgment of the Chesapeake Bay retriever and a correspondingly low opinion of everyone else’s. Oh, and Elsa’s tail, too. Elsa’s correct Chesapeake tail.

  “Eva,” I said, “I’ve been in dogs my whole life. And one of the things I’ve learned is that if you listen long enough, sooner or later you’re going to hear everything about everyone, including yourself.”

  I must have spoken more loudly than I’d intended. Myrna, the raucous New Yorker who’d been at my table the night before, caught my words. “You can say that again,” she boomed. “Half of what you hear from some of these people,” she added, glaring in Eva’s direction, “half of it, you gotta take with a grain of salt.”

  Yes, I thought. But which half?

  THE MASONIC SHTICK is no joke. Take blackballing. As I understand it—maybe I’m wrong—in Freemasonry, blackball is no figure of speech. If you want someone in, you cast a white ball; if not, blac
k. That’s cast as in cast a ballot, or so I assume. As far as I know, in casting their secret votes, the members just slip table tennis balls, white or black, into some sort of container, probably something more or less like a flyball box stripped of the pedal and the resulting ball toss, of course. Unless I’ve been seriously misinformed, the poor applicant doesn’t have to sit on some specially designated ceremonial seat in the middle of the temple and get pelted, pro or con, by member after member of the entire elected assembly. All secret societies play games of one kind or another, but the exclusion-inclusion game is inevitably more complicated than either Ping-Pong or flyball.

  As I look back, though, I realize that if we’d wanted to find a considerate way to deny Eva’s bid for admission, we might as well have placed her on a hard-backed chair in the center of the dining room and taken turns slinging scraps of rejected food in her bulldog face. Would I have participated? Certainly not. Neither would any of the rest of us. Or so I like to suppose. I want to think that we were and are civilized, and I persist in believing that what characterizes civilization is something other than the refinement of cruelty.

  As it was, I cast my vote quite discreetly. When Eva reached into the pocket of her mud-colored, grass-stained jacket, produced a brochure for her kennel-supply and dog-training enterprise, and thrust it at me, I did accept the thing. Before shoving it in my own pocket, I even gave it a cursory look. Perhaps I shouldn’t have. The name of her business infuriated me. “High In Tail,” she called it. If you’re active in obedience, you’ll understand why I thought then and still think that “High In Tail” was a shameless rip-off. If you’re not? Because High In Trial, T-r-i-a-l, is a well-established, well-known, reputable, and otherwise altogether estimable mail-order supplier of leather leads, dumbbells, scent articles, practice jumps, harnesses, and other goodies used in obedience, herding, tracking, Schutzhund, and plain old having fun with your dog. If I’d shown any sense, I’d have realized that the people at High In Trial were capable of looking after themselves; they didn’t need any help from me. It might also have occurred to me that even a language as rich, diverse, and wondrous as that of my own community offered only a limited number of word plays and catchy phrases that might suitably be dogtrotted out into the dog-eat-dog free-market economy of canine commercial enterprise. In brief, had I paws’d to reflect—see what I mean?—I’d have kept my mouth shut.