Then we met a real dog fancier, a woman with long dark hair. “Are you fond of dogs?” we asked, because we noticed that she was staring intently at Sighthound.
“I live for my dog,” she said simply.
“What sort of dog do you have?” we asked.
“A Maltese,” she said, and then she tried to clarify for us her relationship to the dog world. “There are things I don’t do,” she said. “I don’t travel to Far Hills in the driving rain so that my dog can compete with other dogs. On the other hand, I do do a lot of what you might call doting. I pay a lot of attention to how my dog’s hair is washed and cut. On the other hand, I don’t act as a chaperon for my dog.”
We asked her what she meant by “chaperon.”
“Well,” she said, “it’s like children’s social life, where your parents pay for you to go, and you have to go and say hello to the ones brought by other parents.”
We said that she seemed to be talking from the dog’s point of view.
“Yes, that’s what I do do,” the woman said.
Then we looked at a painting of a huge white dog walking in a vast area of pale-green-and-amber grass. The artist was Patrick McManus, and quite soon we found ourself talking to him.
“What sort of dog is it?” we asked.
“It’s a whippet. It needs to be hung in a room bigger than this one.”
“What other kinds of work do you do?”
“I do this. I live hand to mouth. I was a construction worker at one time. I’m a recluse. I don’t come out too often.” He introduced us to his girlfriend, Baby. “I also write songs and write for a dog magazine,” he said.
Lunch was served. There were eleven tables of dog fanciers. There were party favors on the tables donated by J-B Wholesale Pet Supplies, Inc. One of them was a yellow rubber lion. “A pet would be afraid of it,” someone said. We looked over at the head table. There were Mr. Atlee and Mrs. Stone and also Captain Arthur J. Haggerty, who is a famous dog trainer and is famous in another way, too—for looking like Mr. Clean, the cleanser man. He has a big, very bald head.
“I’ve just been to the Dog Museum, in St. Louis,” the woman sitting next to us said. “They just built a new wing. I saw forty years of Snoopy. Snoopy, I thought. Anyway, it’s a fine museum.”
Two of the judges made speeches. Howard Atlee was at the microphone a lot as he introduced people. He announced the winners. We had a chance to have another talk with the serious dog fancier who thinks from the dog’s point of view. We asked her what she most liked about the Dog Fanciers Club.
“Well, my favorite book is dedicated to one of the founders of the club,” she said. “I can tell you are going to ask what my favorite book is. It’s The Complete Maltese, by Nicholas Cutillo. It’s not an old book, but it deals with antiquity. The Maltese is a very old breed.”
“Antiquity?” we asked.
“Antiquity. Mr. Cutillo quotes the Roman poet Martial, who wrote about a Maltese who belonged to a Roman governor of Malta. The Maltese was named Issa. I happen to be able to quote you part of what Martial wrote. He said, ’Issa is more frolicsome than Catullus’ sparrow. Issa is purer than a dove’s kiss. Issa is gentler than a maiden, Issa is more precious than Indian gems.’ I find that to be very moving. My Maltese is more frolicsome than a sparrow, as a matter of fact. I love the name Issa. If I had read this epigram before I named my Maltese, I might have named her Issa. By the way, the epigram ends ‘Lest the last days that she sees the light should snatch her from him forever, Publius had her picture painted.’ So that justifies the idea of painting a dog’s picture.”
We were going to ask this serious dog fancier what name she did give her Maltese, but before we could she turned around and disappeared from the Eugenia Room.
We asked Patrick McManus if he ever painted anything other than dogs.
“I did a whole series of construction workers when I was a construction worker,” he said.
| 1990 |
DOG RACE
Fiction
ROALD DAHL
We were both up early when the big day came. I wandered into the kitchen for a shave, but Claud got dressed right away and went outside to arrange about the straw. Through the kitchen window, I could see the sun just coming up behind the line of trees on top of the ridge the other side of the valley.
Each time Claud came past the window with an armload of straw, I noticed over the rim of the mirror the intent, breathless expression on his face, the great round bullethead thrusting forward and the forehead wrinkled into deep corrugations right up to the hairline. I’d only seen this look on him once before and that was the evening he’d asked Clarice to marry him. Today he was so excited he even walked funny, treading softly as though the concrete around the filling station were a shade too hot for the soles of his feet; and he kept packing more and more straw into the back of the van to make it comfortable for Jackie.
Then he came into the kitchen to fix breakfast, and I watched him put the pot of soup on the stove and begin stirring it. He had a long metal spoon and he kept on stirring and stirring, and about every half minute he leaned forward and stuck his nose into that sickly-sweet steam of cooking horseflesh. Then he started putting extras into it—three peeled onions, a few young carrots, a cupful of stinging-nettle tops, a teaspoon of Valentine’s Meat Extract, twelve drops of cod-liver oil—and everything he touched was handled very gently with the ends of his big fat fingers as though it might have been a little fragment of Venetian glass. He took some minced horse meat from the icebox, measured one handful into Jackie’s bowl, three into the other, and when the soup was ready he shared it out between the two, pouring it over the meat.
It was the same ceremony I’d seen performed each morning for the past five months, but never with such breathless concentration as this. There was no talk, not even a glance my way, and when he turned and went out again to fetch the dogs, even the back of his neck and his shoulders seemed to be whispering, “Oh, Jesus, don’t let anything go wrong, and especially don’t let me do anything wrong today.”
I heard him talking softly to the dogs in the pen as he put the leashes on them, and when he brought them around into the kitchen, they came in prancing and pulling to get at the breakfast, treading up and down with their front feet and waving their enormous tails from side to side like whips.
“All right,” Claud said, speaking at last. “Which is it?”
Most mornings he’d offer to bet me a pack of cigarettes, but there were bigger things at stake today, and I knew all he wanted for the moment was a little extra reassurance.
He watched me as I walked once around the two beautiful, identical, tall, velvety-black dogs, and he moved aside, holding the leashes at arm’s length to give me a better view.
“Jackie!” I said, trying the old trick that never worked. “Hey Jackie!” Two identical heads with identical expressions flicked around to look at me, four bright, identical, deep-yellow eyes stared into mine. There’d been a time when I fancied the eyes of one were a slightly darker yellow than those of the other. There’d also been a time when I thought I could recognize Jackie because of a deeper brisket and a shade more muscle on the hindquarters. But it wasn’t so.
“Come on,” Claud said. He was hoping that today of all days I would make a bad guess.
“This one,” I said. “This is Jackie.”
“Which?”
“This one on the left.”
“There!” he cried, his whole face suddenly beaming. “You’re wrong again!”
“I don’t think I’m wrong.”
“You’re about as wrong as you could possibly be. And now listen, Gordon, and I’ll tell you something. All these last weeks, every morning while you’ve been trying to pick him out—you know what?”
“What?”
“I’ve been keeping count. And the result is you haven’t been right even one-half the time! You’d have done better tossing a coin!”
What he meant was that if I (who saw them e
very day and side by side) couldn’t do it, why the hell should we be frightened of Mr. Feasey. Claud knew Mr. Feasey was famous for spotting ringers, but he knew also that it could be very difficult to tell the difference between two dogs when there wasn’t any.
He put the bowls of food on the floor, giving Jackie the one with the least meat because he was running today. When he stood back to watch them eat, the shadow of deep concern was back again on his face and the large pale eyes were staring at Jackie with the same rapt and melting look of love that up till recently had been reserved only for Clarice.
“You see, Gordon,” he said. “It’s just what I’ve always told you. For the last hundred years, there’s been all manner of ringers, some good and some bad, but in the whole history of dog racing there’s never been a ringer like this.”
“I hope you’re right,” I said, and my mind began travelling back to that freezing afternoon just before Christmas, when Claud had asked to borrow the van, and had driven away in the direction of Aylesbury without saying where he was going. I had assumed he was off to see Clarice, but late in the afternoon he had returned bringing with him this dog he said he’d bought off a man for thirty-five shillings.
“Is he fast?” I had said. We were standing out by the pumps and Claud was holding the dog on a leash and looking at him, and a few snowflakes were falling and settling on the dog’s back. The motor of the van was still running.
“Fast!” Claud had said. “He’s just about the slowest dog you ever saw in your whole life!”
“Then what you buy him for?”
“Well,” he had said, the big bovine face secret and cunning, “it occurred to me that maybe he might possibly look a little bit like Jackie. What d’you think?”
“I suppose he does a bit, now you come to mention it.”
He had handed me the leash and I had taken the new dog inside to dry him off while Claud had gone round to the pen to fetch his beloved. And when he returned and we put the two of them together for the first time, I can remember him stepping back and saying, “Oh, Jesus!” and standing dead still in front of them like he was seeing a phantom. Then he became very quick and quiet. He got down on his knees and began comparing them carefully point by point, and it was almost like the room was getting warmer and warmer the way I could feel his excitement growing every second through this long silent examination in which even the toenails and the dewclaws, eighteen on each dog, were matched alongside one another for color.
“Look,” he had said at last, standing up. “Walk them up and down the room a few times, will you?” And then he had stayed there for quite five or six minutes leaning against the stove with his eyes half closed and his head on one side, watching them and frowning and chewing his lips. After that, as though he didn’t believe what he had seen the first time, he had gone down again on his knees to re-check everything once more; but suddenly, in the middle of it, he had jumped up and looked at me, his face fixed and tense, with a curious whiteness around the nostrils and the eyes. “All right,” he had said, a little tremor in his voice. “You know what? We’re home. We’re rich.”
And then the secret conferences between us in the kitchen, the detailed planning, the selection of the most suitable track, and finally every other Saturday, eight times in all, locking up my filling station (losing a whole afternoon’s custom) and driving the ringer all the way up to Oxford to a scruffy little track out in the fields near Headingley where the big money was played but which was actually nothing except a line of old posts and cord to mark the course, an upturned bicycle for pulling the dummy hare, and at the far end, in the distance, six traps and the starter. We had driven this ringer up there eight times over a period of sixteen weeks and entered him with Mr. Feasey and stood around on the edge of the crowd in the freezing raining cold, waiting for his name to go up on the blackboard in chalk. The Black Panther we called him. And when his time came, Claud would always lead him down to the traps and I would stand at the finish to catch him and keep him clear of the fighters, the gypsy dogs that the gypsies so often slipped in specially to tear another one to pieces at the end of a race.
“Leave it on.”
But you know, there was something rather sad about taking this dog all the way up there so many times and letting him run and watching him and hoping and praying that whatever happened he would always come last. Of course, the praying wasn’t necessary and we never really had a moment’s worry because the old fellow simply couldn’t gallop and that’s all there was to it. He ran exactly like a crab. The only time he didn’t come last was when a big fawn dog by the name of Amber Plash put his foot in a hole and broke a hock and finished on three legs. But even then ours only just beat him. So this way we got him right down to bottom grade with the scrubbers, and the last time we were there all the bookies were laying him twenty or thirty to one and calling his name and begging people to back him.
Now at last, today, on this sunny day, it was Jackie’s turn to go instead. Claud said we mustn’t run the ringer any more or Mr. Feasey might begin to get tired of him and throw him out altogether, he was so slow. Claud said this was the exact psychological time to have it off, and that Jackie would win it anything between thirty and fifty lengths.
He had raised Jackie from a pup and the dog was only fifteen months now, but he was a good fast runner. He’d never raced yet, but we knew he was fast from clocking him round the little private schooling track at Uxbridge where Claud had taken him every Sunday since he was seven months old—except once when he was having some inoculations. Claud said he probably wasn’t fast enough to win top grade at Mr. Feasey’s, but where we’d got him now, in bottom grade with the scrubbers, he could fall over and get up again and still win it twenty—well, anyway ten or fifteen lengths.
So all I had to do this morning was go to the bank in the village and draw out fifty pounds for myself and fifty for Claud, which I would lend him as an advance against wages, and then at twelve o’clock lock up the filling station and hang the notice on one of the pumps saying “GONE FOR THE DAY.” Claud would shut the ringer in the pen at the back and put Jackie in the van and off we’d go. I won’t say I was as excited about it as Claud, but there again, I didn’t have all sorts of important things depending on it either, like buying a house and being able to get married. Nor was I almost born in a kennel with greyhounds like he was, walking about thinking of absolutely nothing else—except perhaps Clarice in the evenings. Personally, I had my own career as a filling-station owner to keep me busy, not to mention second-hand cars, but if Claud wanted to fool around with dogs that was all right with me, especially a thing like today—if it came off. As a matter of fact, I don’t mind admitting that every time I thought about the money we were putting on and the money we might win, my stomach gave a little lurch.
The dogs had finished their breakfast now and Claud took them out for a short walk across the field opposite while I got dressed and fried the eggs. Afterward, I went to the bank and drew out the money (all in ones), and the rest of the morning seemed to go very quickly serving customers.
At twelve sharp, I locked up and hung the notice on the pump. Claud came around from the back leading Jackie and carrying a large suitcase made of reddish-brown cardboard.
“Suitcase?”
“For the money,” Claud answered. “You said yourself no man can carry two thousand pound in his pockets.”
Jackie looked wonderful, with two big hard muscles the size of melons bulging on his hindquarters, his coat glistening like black velvet. While Claud was putting the suitcase in the van, the dog did a little prancing jig on his toes to show how fit he was, then he looked up at me and grinned, just like he knew he was off to the races to win two thousand pounds and a heap of glory.
We got in the van and off we went. I was doing the driving. Claud was beside me and Jackie was standing up on the straw in the rear looking over our shoulders through the windshield. Claud kept turning round and trying to make him lie down so he wouldn’t get thr
own whenever we went round the sharp corners, but the dog was too excited to do anything except grin back at him and wave his enormous tail.
“You got the money, Gordon?” Claud was chain-smoking cigarettes and quite unable to sit still.
“Yes.”
“Mine as well?”
“I got a hundred and five altogether. Five for the winder like you said, so he won’t stop the hare and make it a no race.”
“Good,” Claud said, rubbing his hands together hard as though he were freezing cold. “Good good good.”
PRIVATE WIRE
Among the pampered pets of the city is an elderly bulldog who has his own telephone extension. He lives in an old-fashioned brownstone on the upper West Side with an old lady who clung for a long time to the wall-type instrument. The dog used to dash to the telephone every time it rang and worry the cord, with the result that the repairman had to be called in about once a month. When his mistress finally had a handset phone installed, she asked them to leave the old one on the wall. Now, whenever there is a call, the dog takes it on his own wire. Makes for peace of mind all around. | 1938 |
We drove through the little narrow High Street of Great Missenden and caught a glimpse of old Rummins going into the Nag’s Head for his morning pint, then outside the village we turned left and climbed over the ridge of the Chilterns toward Princes Risborough, and from there it would only be twenty-odd miles to Oxford.
The Big New Yorker Book of Dogs Page 34
