Paws before dying

by Conant, Susan

  “Sent you to a Holiday Inn.”

  We both laughed.

  “How did you know that?” I asked.

  “She did it to me once, too. My mother asked if I could stay for one night, and she said there wasn’t any room and I should go to the Holiday Inn. And her house has eighteen rooms.”

  “And when Chrissie got married, I’ll bet she didn’t invite you to the wedding, did she?”

  “No,” Leah said. “My mother said she was afraid she’d have to feed us.”

  “You didn’t miss much. It was those tuna fish sandwiches on Wonder bread.”

  “With the crusts cut off,” Leah said.

  “That’s why people make jokes about Protestant weddings,” I said.

  “My father says that it isn’t being stingy. It’s just avoiding conspicuous consumption.”

  “Well, at Chrissie’s wedding, anything to consume was so inconspicuous you could’ve starved to death. And she didn’t even invite you. Talk about people who make you feel excluded. I mean, these are people who don’t just make you feel excluded. They actually leave you out.”

  Chapter 5

  “UGLY,” pronounced Kevin Dennehy, who had planted himself squarely on one of my kitchen chairs with his feet apart on the floor. His thighs are so massive that if he sits down with his feet together, he has to spread his knees like a frog in mid-kick. His arms were crossed on his chest, and the muscles in his cheeks and jaws looked as if he’d figured out how to bulk up his face with free weights. He repeated the word and glowered: “Ugly.”

  “It is ugly,” I said. “Didn’t something like this happen a while ago in Weston?”

  “Yeah. And in Newton before, too. One of the high schools.” He was talking to me, not to Leah.

  “So what did it say exactly?” she asked him. Dressed in hot-pink running shorts over a black leotard and footless tights, she was perched on a stool drinking a glass of a diet drink called Crystal Light, the one food—if you can call it that—she’d asked me to buy for her. It tasted so impotable that even Kimi refused to steal it. “When they called, they just asked if I’d seen anything. They didn’t say much.”

  “Swastikas,” Kevin said. “And anti-, uh, Semitic words. Spray-painted. In red.” His eyes rested briefly on Leah as if she might not understand the symbolism of a swastika, the meaning of anti-Semitic, or the significance of the color red.

  “All of that is fascist, you know,” she informed us. “It’s from Nazi Germany, including the color.”

  “Actually, we do know.” I tried to sound as if Kevin and I happened to be unusually well informed.

  The graffiti had been discovered early that morning by a runner taking a shortcut through Eliot Park. He called the police, who talked to the neighbors and discovered either from them or from Parks and Recreation that Nonantum had been using the park the previous night. The Newton police had called me and everyone else from the club to ask if we’d noticed anything. Leah and I hadn’t seen anything to make us suspicious. The Newton police hadn’t told us any details of the incident, and Kevin knew the few he did only because John Saporski, his colleague and buddy, grew up in Newton.

  “So,” I went on, “all we know is that it happened sometime after we left and before this jogger ran through there, so sometime in the night. Did any of the neighbors see anything?”

  “Not unless they got X-ray vision.” Kevin shifted in his seat. “The wall. Right.” I nodded. That’s where the graffiti were painted, on the inside of the concrete and stone wall that surrounds the park entrance. I’d assumed it was a WPA project. It had that carefully designed, perfectly constructed, labor-intensive look. “Anyway, someone could’ve noticed someone going in or coming out. Or maybe a car was parked there or something.”

  “Could be,” said Kevin unenthusiastically.

  “Maybe someone will remember something, someone who isn’t home from work, someone they haven’t talked to yet.”

  “Maybe,” said Kevin.

  Steve and I finally got some time alone that evening because Leah had a date to go into Harvard Square with a kid she’d met at dog training. His name was Jeff Cohen. He was tall and gangly, with curly dark blond hair destined to turn brown by the time he reached eighteen, and he turned out to be the handler of the snazzy black and white border collie I’d noticed in Bess’s class. Unfortunately, he didn’t bring the dog when he came to pick up Leah, but otherwise, he seemed pleasant and trustworthy enough. He shook hands with Steve and me, admired the picture of Larry Bird, and apologized to my disappointed dogs for leaving them home. Steve and I decided that there can’t be too much wrong with a Celtics fan who owns a border collie. Border collies are smaller than rough-coated collies like Lassie. I can’t write it in Dog’s Life or say it aloud in my own house, but the border collie is undoubtedly the most intelligent and trainable breed in the world. Trained border collies understand seventy or eighty commands and control flocks of sheep by staring at them with their eerie, hypnotic eyes. Owning one is a sign of good character. And he brought Leah home at exactly eleven.

  The next time I saw Jeff Cohen was on Thursday evening. He and his dog, Lance, were warming up for the ring in a grassy area by the parking lot of the Lincoln Kennels. The town of Lincoln is a rural suburb with lots of high-tech industry executives who build discreet glass and wood palaces in the forest, join the Audubon Society, buy Labs and golden retrievers, and have them trained and boarded at pretty, pastoral Lincoln Kennels. Jeffs dog looked at home in the country setting, and in spite of the muggy heat that would make most of the dogs lag, this one was keeping his strange, piercing eyes fixed on Jeff, who held himself rigid.

  “Jeff looks a little nervous,” I said to Leah as I killed the engine.

  “He’ll be all right,” she said. “Let’s go.”

  “We have to exercise them first,” I said. “Soiling in the ring is an automatic disqualification. Then we check in. Then we warm them up. Just a little heeling, sits, a couple of finishes. Nothing that even looks like real training.”

  I’d insisted on grooming and bathing the dogs. A lot of people don’t bother just for a fun match, but Marissa always maintained that turning up with a grungy dog tells the judge, the dog, and everyone else that you have no respect for the sport. For an indoor trial, I always dress up, and for an outdoor fun match like this one, I wear new jeans and a decent-looking shirt. Leah had French-braided her hair into an elaborate series of demure plaits and exchanged her multi-exercise outfits for a pair of jeans and a plain blue T-shirt she’d borrowed from me.

  Ten minutes later, when we’d registered and fastened on our armbands, we spotted Rose Engleman sitting in a folding chair near the Utility ring, which, like the other rings, was simply a roped-off rectangle in the middle of the field. Perched in Rose’s lap, Caprice was evidently assessing the competition. A couple of other people with real obedience dogs—a sheltie and a golden—were talking with her. Heather and Abbey, though, had set up their chairs so close to the ring entrance that they were all but in it. Between their chairs was a silvery gray polypropylene crate. A thermos and two cups sat on top of it. I assumed that Panache, Heather’s poodle, was inside.

  We’d have settled down near Rose, but it is against my principles to station a malamute anywhere near an obedience ring. No matter how perfectly the malamute behaves, something about the scent or appearance of the breed constitutes an unfair distraction to the dog who’s working. We did say hello to her, though, and then, with only about ten minutes until our turns, we found an unoccupied place on the little hill above the rings, where we spread out a blanket, gave the dogs some water, and dampened their bellies to help them cool off.

  “If it starts raining, she’s going to break on the down,” I told Leah, who really belonged in Pre-Novice where Kimi would never have been off lead. In case you don’t train dogs—really? why not?—maybe I should add that on the down, the dog is supposed to hit the ground and stay there. Standing up or moving around instead of staying is op
timistically known as breaking, but, in truth, I hoped that Kimi didn’t shatter to pieces by leaping out of the ring or pouncing on another dog. Kimi belonged in Pre-Novice, too, but Leah had spurned my advice. And want to hear something unfair? Since Kimi was registered to me and I’d put titles on Vinnie, Rowdy, and lots of other dogs, my experience forced Leah into Novice B, even though Leah herself had never owned any dog or entered any match or trial before. In fact, if I’d done nothing more than put a C.D. on Rowdy, Leah would still have had to enter B instead of A. Most of the handlers in Novice B aren’t novices at all. “She hates wet grass,” I added, “so don’t be disappointed. And in this heat, she’s going to lag. When she does, give her an extra command. Just say, ‘Heel.’ You’ll lose points, but you can still qualify. All she has to do is stay within six feet of you. And whatever you do, don’t slow down yourself. If the judge thinks you’re adapting your pace, you’ll lose a lot of points.”

  “I know, I know,” she said, but smiled tolerantly. “You already told me. Relax, would you? It’s a fun match. Fun, right?” She stroked Kimi’s face and ran her fingers over the black of her Lone Ranger goggles.

  “Fun,” I said. “Okay. All you do now is wait near the entrance to your ring. Keep her sitting at heel, and keep her attention on you. The stewards will tell you when it’s your turn.”

  As Rowdy and I waited at ringside—we were in Open—I saw her enter the Novice B ring, and I noticed how composed she looked and how straight Kimi sat as the judge spoke to Leah. After that, my attention was on my own judge and on Rowdy, who slowed down in anticipation on the Drop command, but hit the ground smartly when it came and otherwise did pretty well. When we left the ring, Leah and Kimi were already on our blanket, and Kimi was chewing up the last bits of a dog biscuit. That didn’t mean a thing. I’d instructed Leah to reward Kimi no matter what happened.

  “So how was it?” I asked.

  “Great!” The normal response from a first-time handler at a match consists of a detailed account of everything that went wrong and concludes with a vow never to enter a ring again, at least with this dog. “The judge was so nice.”

  “Did he say you qualified? So far?” In case you don’t show in obedience, I should say that after the Novice and Open individual exercises—the ones in which you and your dog are the only team in the ring—come the group exercises, the long sit and the long down.

  Leah’s face fell.

  “If you hadn’t, he’d probably have told you.” Some of the judges at fun matches aren’t yet American Kennel Club judges—they do fun matches for experience—and they occasionally forget things. I questioned Leah about the obvious errors that would have made Kimi fail—not coming on the recall, leaving the ring, soiling, walking away on the stand for examination—and Leah claimed that Kimi hadn’t committed any of them. “So you probably qualified. That’s fantastic. Congratulations. We’ve qualified, too. So far.”

  The time between qualifying in the individual exercises and reentering the ring for the sits and downs is nerve-racking for most beginners. Leah drank some water from the dogs’ thermos, stretched out on the blanket between them, and propped herself up on her elbows to watch Jeff and the border collie, who were in the Pre-Novice ring. Rowdy was nuzzling the blanket in search of stray crumbs from his giant-size Old Mother Hubbard biscuit, Kimi was resting her lovely head on her forepaws, dogs and handlers were working in all the rings, Leah’s eyes were heavy, and the long day of heat and humidity was drugging me. I felt illuminated: the hot, damp greenery, my unexpected cousin, my beautiful dogs, other dogs, other handlers, a momentary satori in canine Zen. Then it broke.

  “You want to see something?” I said to Leah. “Watch over there, the Utility ring. You see the silver standard poodle?”

  “He was there the other night.”

  “That’s the one. And opposite is Heather, his handler, right? With the silver hair?”

  “So?”

  “So look in back of Heather, outside the ring. You see that really skinny woman with long brown hair? In the green flowered shirt?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Notice that her arms are crossed. Her hands are closed, sort of in fists, as if she’s got something in them. And she’s watching the dog, right? That’s called double handling. That’s Heather’s daughter, Abbey, and they’ve practiced this routine so they’ve got it cold. It’s illegal to take food into the ring, but the dog’s been taught there’s something in Abbey’s hand, liver or something, and Abbey stations herself where the dog can see her. If the dog starts to break, she probably moves her hand a little, or does something, something really subtle.”

  “That’s cheating!”

  “It’s a mother and daughter act,” I said.

  The silver poodle didn’t break, of course. I watched until the end. Then I heard a deep male voice hollering.

  At the edge of the field closest to the parking lot, Rose’s exstudent, Willie, was leaning on the long registration table. He seemed to be filling out an entry form. He looked as if he might be trying to bury his face in it. His blond German shepherd lay on the ground at his feet. About five yards beyond the end of the table, another blond young man was shouting at another shepherd, a cowering, snarling dog that kept lunging toward him.

  “Kaiser, you bastard, down!” he yelled, and he yanked hard on the dog’s collar.

  “Is he supposed to be doing that?” Leah sat up. “Oh, God. You know who that is? And that’s Righteous and what’s his name, Willie. That’s his brother. The one—”

  “Next door to Rose and Jack. Yeah. And no. He isn’t supposed to be doing that. Someone will speak to him. What are they doing here, anyway?”

  “Bess gave us the fliers, remember? But you said—”

  “I did, and it’s not allowed.”

  Even from a distance I could see that the brother’s shepherd had a long, soft, silky coat—undesirable in the breed—that needed a shampoo. If the dog had been scrubbed, I guessed, his pale fur would have looked washed out, not rich like the first dog’s. When his handler took a step ahead, the dog suddenly jerked his head toward the man. It looked to me as if he tried to bite him. The man retaliated. He raised an arm and smashed the dog hard on the flank, and the dog yelped. In his unceasing hope that a fabulous dog fight would break out and that he could launch himself in the center of it, Rowdy leapt up, and Kimi, the radical feminist, joined him. If I’d stayed on the blanket, Rowdy could easily have hauled me across the field and into the shepherd’s jaws, but I stood up, got a good grip on his lead, braced myself, and told him to sit. He did. Without being asked, Leah took charge of Kimi. In fact, she seemed so capable of managing the dogs that I started to hand her Rowdy’s lead— I intended to step in, but not with Rowdy—when I saw that one of the judges, a man I didn’t know, was finally going to intervene.

  “There’s a judge,” I told Leah. “And somebody else. That is totally forbidden. You aren’t allowed to do anything more than a little warm-up. You can’t even really train, and hitting a dog is totally against the rules. At a show, they’d make him leave the grounds. I don’t know what they’ll do here.”

  The judges and the officials running the match were slow to respond, because, I suppose, they were as surprised as I was. Once in a while, someone who hasn’t bothered to read the rule book starts training at a show or talks a little loudly to a dog, and dogs occasionally get aggressive, but most shows, trials, and matches are harmonious. The human participants who worship dogs, and the few who train harshly do so only in private, partly because they know the rules and partly because they want to avoid creating a bad public impression of the sport.

  “That’s my judge,” Leah said proudly. “What’s he saying?”

  “He’s probably telling him to leave.”

  By then, the shepherd, beaten into submission, was lying quietly by his owner. The judge was obviously lecturing. One of people from the Lincoln Kennels, a guy who has shelties, was standing nearby with his arms folded over his chest
. Suddenly the blond handler hauled on the dog’s lead, dragged the poor shepherd to his feet, and shouted at the judge so that everyone heard: “Well, screw you! You hear that? Screw all of you!” Heading for the parking lot, he added, “Come on, Willie. Let's get the hell out of here.”

  “Poor Willie,” Leah said. “How totally embarrassing.”

  “Jesus,” I said. “The poor dog. And the poor judge. You know, things like this don’t happen. This is not what it’s like.”

  “I saw a bumper sticker on a car the other day,” Leah said. “It said: ‘Shit happens.’ I couldn’t figure out what it meant. I guess this is what it meant.” She looked at me and smiled.

  She had that special gift of making things all right again. One of her other gifts was King Solomon’s ring, the one that let him talk with animals. She and Kimi ended up with an impressive 192 1/2 (out of that perfect 200) and a second-place ribbon. Rowdy, who lost points for slowing down before the drop and for some sloppy sits, got a 187 and third place. Four ribbons — two for qualifying, two for placing—is pretty spectacular if the two dogs are Alaskan malamutes and it’s one handler’s first time in the ring.

  The standard color for a first-place ribbon at a trial is blue, but at a match, it’s rose. I’d missed the Utility awards, but on the way out, we ran into the suitably named Rose Englemanj who had her first-place ribbon in one hand and Caprice’s thin blue lead in the other. Caprice was bouncing around and showing off.

  “Congratulations,” I said to both of them. Then I got down; to business. “How did Heather do?”

  “Second,” Rose said. “By one point.” Handlers like Rose and Heather, I might add, often enter fun matches noncompetitively. That night, though, each had clearly decided that the other’s presence justified her own competition. Even so, Rose did not brag about her own score. She didn’t even tell me what it was.