Black Ribbon

by Susan Conant

  Anyway, the column to which Cam directed my attention—“Nose to the Dirt,” this journalistic gem was called—appeared under the shamelessly plagiarized nom de plume of Snoopy, according to whom—Dog Beat’s, not Charles Schultz’s—Sara Altman and Heather Richards were starting their own agility camp next year. Had Max McGuire heard the news? And if Waggin’ Tail made it through its first year, would Max have any staff left? Not according to the rumors that had reached Dog Beat.

  Maxine must have read the item at the same time I did. “Heather,” Max demanded shrilly, “is this true?”

  Heather, who’d supplied herself with coffee, took a casual sip. “It’s just something we’ve discussed.”

  “Well, not with me!” Maxine snapped.

  In what I took to be an effort to deworm Max’s mood with a purgative dose of reality, Eric reminded her that Dog Beat wasn’t exactly a reliable source of information. Phyllis was obviously alive, he pointed out. So was what’s-her-name’s dog. But as Max correctly told him, Heather and Sara hadn’t denied the rumor. Far from it! Hadn’t Eric just heard …? Was that what he called loyalty? Was it his idea of loyalty, too? Maybe Eric was also planning …

  Eric spoke calmly. “Max, running a camp’s not on my agenda.” He excused himself from the table and rose. In a huff, Max followed him. Don and Phyllis, who’d been muttering about who at Dog Beat was really to blame and how best to deal with the situation, were now giving voice to long lists of people they needed to call. With Don stating that he’d track the damn thing down, they departed. Everyone else was leaving, too. I’d had all the human company I needed for one day. I started to slip out of my chair.

  In back of me, Heather addressed Eva Spitteler: “You did this, didn’t you? I know you did.”

  Sara, chiming in, said, “All of it! The cards, the scary stuff, everything! And you know what? Everyone knows you did it, too, because you’re the only one here who’s mean enough. You just can’t stand to see anyone else have fun, can you?”

  For the third time, the force hit the back of my chair, but I’d just squeezed out, and I escaped the impact. As I crept away, Eva was loudly defending herself. “You know what you’re doing? You’re scapegoating me! And the reason is, you’re just jealous, is all, because you’re all trying to make a living in dogs, and not one of you’s got a clue of how to do it. Let me tell you something. The real problem here isn’t me; it’s Maxine. She’s greedy, and she’s stingy, and she’s not even good at covering it up. She doesn’t know the first thing about running a business or about allocating resources. She can’t plan, she can’t make decisions, she can’t follow through. And she’s stupid: She made a whole lot of promises she couldn’t keep. This whole damn camp is completely disorganized. But, hey, everyone’s buddy-buddy with good old Max. So who gets the blame? Me. And I paid good money to be here, and all I’ve got for it is your shit.”

  What popped into my mind was, of all things, a line from a poem I’d had to memorize in high school: “The world is too much with us; late and soon.…” Wordsworth. I remembered his first name: William. His country: England. England, fair England, where the official church is the C of E and the true religion is the worship of dogs. Not just England, either! Taken together, the British Isles constitute a devout Bible-belt of fervent canine fundamentalism, country after country, county after county, district after district pledged to the Irish setter, the Irish wolfhound, the Scottish deerhound, the pointer, the foxhound, the Border collie, the Welsh corgi, both Cardigan and Pembroke; terrier after incredible terrier, Irish, Welsh, West Highland White, Norwich, Norfolk, bull, Bedlington, Dandie Dinmont, Staffordshire, Kerry blue, soft-coated wheaten, Skye, Sealyham, Manchester, Lakeland, and the others, present and past; the Old English sheepdog, of course, and the collie, smooth and rough, the Shetland sheepdog, and the toys, too, the Yorkie, the English toy spaniel, and, speaking of spaniels, the Sussex, the Welsh springer, the English springer, and … Well, if I haven’t gotten to your breed, sorry, but the list is almost endless and, even if complete, wouldn’t tell me what I didn’t know, which was, of course, the particular breed favored by Wordsworth, he of late and soon. But I knew what mattered: I knew that when Wordsworth wrote, “The world is too much with us; late and soon,” he meant that he’d had it with human beings and was desperate for the company of dogs.

  As was I. I almost ran back to the cabin, and as soon as I got inside, I practically yanked the latch off Rowdy’s crate in my eagerness for contact with his pure-hearted goodwill. Never lived with a malamute? Well, according to the official standard, the Alaskan malamute is “playful on invitation, but generally impressive by his dignity after maturity,” a description that illustrates the divergence of Dog English from what is absurdly called Standard English, as if there were anything normal, or, God forbid, desirable about stripping the language as a whole of the rich phraseology of the fancy. But as always, back to the Alaskan malamute, Rowdy, in this case, quintessence of the standard, “playful on invitation, but generally impressive by his dignity after maturity,” meaning in Standard English, that after maturity, which is to say, in advanced old age and beyond, he’ll display an air of noble reserve, but that until then, he’ll fool around at absolutely anyone’s invitation, including his own, which is to say that Rowdy bounded from his crate with a furry toy whale in his mouth, gave it a hard shake, dropped it, rose on his hindquarters, rested his snowshoe paws in my outstretched hands, and cleansed my face and soul of that icky residue, the grime of too much with us, late and soon.

  “You want to go out?” I asked him. “Go for a walk?” Rowdy doesn’t fetch his leash the way Vinnie did, but he understood what I meant and headed for the door. I snapped on his flex lead.

  At the end of the dark afternoon, the sun had set by swelling to ten times its former size, turning a garish shade of raspberry, and exploding into the tops of the mountains like a flambéed dessert blowing up in the faces of the gods. Now, hours later, the moon’s balm soothed the burns. Low to the ground, twin sets of lights twinkled, nighttime safety collars around the necks of what looked like little phantom dogs. The air was fragrant with pine. Enforcer of the buddy system, I wandered to the dock, led Rowdy to the end, looked, listened, and nowhere found a sign of a swimmer. Strolling toward the main lodge, I saw the burning cigarettes of three or four people sitting on the stairs. Like a patriotic cartographer intent on charting unknown land and claiming it for his own, Rowdy marked tree after tree.

  “Could we get down to business here, buddy?” I asked him. “Be a good boy! Hurry up!” Code words, those. Kimi obeys them. Rowdy does, too, but not at the cost of cutting short a good walk. Or maybe he knew that there was no real hurry. He wasn’t due in the show ring, and my only appointment was with a soft pillow. I liked the feel of the night air, and I liked letting Rowdy mark his trees. He was a dog being a dog. Maxine passed nearby, the massive Cash on lead. I said hi and moved on. Here and there, other dog walkers meandered, some in silence, some in small murmuring groups. I missed Kimi. With only one dog, I felt unbalanced, incomplete. But I missed no one’s company but hers, not even Steve Delaney’s. When Rowdy had charted our route away from the lake and back to the wooded stretch that separated the cabins from the bunkhouse, I heard a couple of cabin doors bang lightly. A distant voice said something I couldn’t really hear.

  The next sounds I couldn’t miss: the yelp of a dog in sudden pain, a female scream of fright, and the unmistakable cursing of Eva Spitteler. The light outside her cabin, hers on one side, Joy and Craig’s on the other, showed something of a classic postdogfight tableau, two groups, each bending over to check the wounds of the canine combatants. At the first sound of the fight, Rowdy had yanked out the entire length of the retractable lead and, convinced that he was missing the greatest camp activity yet, a spectacular dog battle that he’d undoubtedly win, had tried to haul me into the center of the fracas. You know who Carol Lea Benjamin is? That’s not a digression. Really it isn’t. Carol Lea Benjamin is a genius
dog writer who captured in a few words the whole point of the Alaskan malamute from the breed’s own point of view, and I quote her: “The Malamute, the one with the big ‘S’ on his chest.” Rowdy doesn’t need a phone booth. He doesn’t believe in kryptonite, either.

  By the time I’d hauled him in, Bingo was quiet, and so was Joy’s little sort-of Cairn, Lucky, who, to my amazement, had inflicted the only visible damage. In the light from the cabin and the beam of Eva Spitteler’s flashlight, I could see blood flowing from one of Bingo’s ears. Little Lucky, though, was unscathed. From the cock of his head, he was pretty proud of himself. The dogfight was over. The human fight was just beginning. It, too, ended quickly.

  “Bingo’s bleeding!” Eva yelled. “He’s going to need plastic surgery, and you’re going to pay for it!”

  With boldness as surprising as Lucky’s, Joy replied, “It was your fault for dropping that food right in between them. If you didn’t have to go around all the time stuffing your fat face—”

  Craig tried to intervene: “Joy—”

  “You bitch!” Eva shrieked. “Look what that little rat of yours has done to my beautiful show dog!” Lowering her voice only slightly, she added, “Vicious little pet-shop mutt.”

  How to hurt a man? How to hurt a woman, too. Joy scooped up Lucky, hugged him, and began to sob. Craig wrapped protective arms around both of them. From the opposite side of the circle of light, Maxine McGuire suddenly spoke. “Eva,” she said, sounding as calm as Cash looked, “that will do. You are out of line. You can stay here tonight, but in the morning, you pack up and get out. This is my camp, and I want you out of here by eight A.M. Read your contract. Out you go.”

  “Not on your life,” Eva screeched.

  I missed whatever followed. I didn’t want to hear it. With the dogfight over, Rowdy had lost interest. We went quietly to our own cabin. As I stood on the deck trying to regain the peace Eva had spoiled, I heard Phyllis Abbott. She was using that distinctive voice that people reserve for the telephone. “Greatly exaggerated?” she asked with outrage. “Why does everyone keep saying greatly exaggerated? It’s a total fabrication!”

  EARLY THE NEXT MORNING, the unseasonably hot sun beating on the dead-calm lake inspired me to join Eric Grimaldi and Elsa the Chesapeake for what proved to be a frigid swim. Impervious to the cold, Eric stood waist-deep in the water and kept tossing out Elsa’s blue-and-white rubber retrieve toy. To generate internal heat, I engaged in hot competition with Elsa, racing her for the toy, losing, and again pitting my inadequate flailing against her effortless surge.

  Heather and Sara may have made their discovery as Elsa and I were sprinting toward the rubber toy. Perhaps it happened while I was clambering over the sharp rocks at the edge of the lake in a dash toward my towel. Maybe I was standing terry-wrapped on the dock, smirking at Eric’s efforts to bribe Elsa out of the lake with a dog biscuit and at her gleeful refusal of what she clearly saw as a bad bargain. At about the same time that I was fooling around with Elsa, Sara and Heather made an early check of their colorful canine playground in the woods, where they discovered a body pinned beneath the collapsed ramps of the massive A-frame. The fallen ramps covered the head and torso, but the clumsy sandals could have belonged to no one except Eva Spitteler. No one else would have worn the clunky things at all, certainly not over camouflage-patterned socks. The ugly military-green trousers were recognizably Eva’s, too. Touching the flesh between a cuff and a sock, Sara felt no warmth. Even so, she and Heather decided to apply their strength to shifting the heavy ramps. As Sara told me, “We’re athletes, just like our dogs. It didn’t seem right to leave her lying there, especially … Well, just in case. Really, we knew, though. But at the time, it seemed like we had to try. It was our equipment; it felt like our responsibility. And, of course, she’d threatened to go and use it. She kept saying one A.M. We could’ve stayed out there all night. I could’ve—I’ve got a tent with me. It would’ve been no big deal.”

  Too late to save Eva’s life, Sara maintained a civilized vigil over the pieces of the A-frame and the body they had crushed. Heather went to summon help. If I hadn’t bothered to dry my hair and if I’d crated Rowdy without giving him a little quick-leg-lift trip outside, I might have been sitting at breakfast when Heather arrived at the main lodge. I’d have been at a table eating eggs and muffins when she dashed in, found Max, and broke the news about the accident. I might even have been among the campers who followed Heather back to the agility area, maybe one of the people who made an effort to straighten out Eva’s twisted body. People shed their jackets and sweatshirts, I heard, and placed them over Eva’s battered corpse as a sort of makeshift crazy-quilt shroud. The body shouldn’t have been moved, covered, or even touched, but the massive obstacle had landed directly on Eva’s head. I wouldn’t have been able to keep looking, either.

  Because I lingered in the shower and dutifully took Rowdy out, I learned of Eva Spitteler’s death when I arrived at the main lodge, where Chuck Siegel, Cam, and a couple of other obedience people were ordering Maxine to call the police.

  Instead of responding, Max caught my eye. With uncharacteristic solemnity she said, “Holly, the most awful thing has happened. Eva Spitteler has had a terrible accident.”

  With an exasperated sigh, Cam said outright that Eva was dead.

  “You’re positive?” I asked. “Because—”

  Cam shook her head. Her face was pale. “She never stood a chance. She must’ve been trying to raise the height of the A-frame, and she was underneath, fixing the chains, I guess, when the whole thing collapsed on her. Her head must’ve been right under one of those support beams. It’s like … It’s like somebody picked up the A-frame and hit her over the head with it.”

  Let me explain the construction of an A-frame. Each ramp is three feet wide and nine feet long, and when they’re joined together, they’re held in place at the top—at the peak of the A—by a couple of hinges. If the A-frame were raised to competition height—a bit over six feet above the ground—with nothing to link the ramps but the hinges at the apex? And then a big dog raced up and over? WHAM! So there have to be additional supports of some kind, for instance, in the case of Heather and Sara’s A-frame, a pair of chains. On that kind of A-frame, the chains are like double crossbars on a capital A—what makes the A-frame an A, and not just an upside down V that would fall apart if it took any weight. Okay so far? If so, it’s obvious that every time you raise or lower the height of the obstacle, you don’t just move the hinged ramps up or down; you also have to reset the chains. Still lost? Draw a tall, skinny capital A and then a short, fat capital A. Look at the crossbars, one very short, the other very wide. And to set the chains? You have to get under the obstacle, where the chains hook to the ramps.

  “Cam,” Max said sharply, “it was a terrible accident.” There were bright spots of color on her cheeks.

  “Of course it was,” Cam said, “except that she had no business being out there, and—”

  Chuck tried to break in, but before he could succeed, a plump, prosperous-looking man with an air of authority—the manager of the resort, I assumed—approached Maxine and announced that someone named Wayne was on his way.

  “That’s Wayne Varney,” Maxine explained to us. “Well, that’s all right. Wayne will know what to do.” After Chuck had asked just who Wayne was, she said, “Oh, he’s Rangeley Police, and I think …” Addressing the plump man, she asked, “Is Wayne still a deputy, too?”

  The man nodded.

  The city kids probably expected to see the lodge doors swing open to admit a six-gun-toting clone of Charles Bronson. Law enforcement people in the State of Maine are, of course, armed—so, for that matter, is the bulk of the citizenry—but sheriffs and their deputies carry up-to-date weapons in ordinary holsters, as do the state and local police. County sheriffs and deputies are important in Maine because—believe it or not, New Workers—up in the wild woods, there’s mile after beautiful square mile of sparsely-populated land divided
into what the tax bills call “unorganized territories,” areas with names but no governments, and entities marked on the maps only by abbreviations that must mystify the tourists, T3 R 13 WELS—Township 3 Range 13 West of the Easterly Line of the State—Big Ten Township, Rainbow, Redington, and plantations, too, in all of which, there being no local police to call, you holler for the deputy, who may, as in the case of Wayne Varney, also be a police officer in a nearby town. All that’s assuming that you haven’t had a boating accident, which would be Fish and Game’s business, or … Well, you get the idea. And Eva Spitteler clearly hadn’t had a boating accident. In fact, soon after the pale blue Chevy Caprice cruiser pulled into the parking lot of the Mooselookmeguntic Four Seasons Resort Lodge and Cabins, Wayne Varney refused to assume that Eva’s death had been any kind of accident at all.