Dancing Dogs

by Jon Katz

  When she finally got to the clinic, she opened the door and was hit by a wave of grief. Gracie’s last walk. She began to cry.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, sobbing as Carmen came out from behind her desk and put an arm around her.

  “Take off your coat, sit down. I’ll take Gracie from you.”

  The tiny waiting room was empty, most of the lights turned off. Carmen took the suitcase and began rolling it to an office in the rear.

  “Wait,” Carolyn called out, and Carmen stopped so that she could kneel beside the suitcase and put her arm around the top. After a moment, she got up, watching as Carmen pulled the suitcase into the back. She wished she had thought of something appropriate to say.

  “Bye, Gracie,” she said, her eyes filling up.

  In a few minutes, Carmen returned with the empty suitcase.

  Carolyn looked up at the fliers for lost dogs and cats and the posters about rabies, ticks, and Lyme disease. She saw a leaflet titled “When You Lose Your Pet” and took it, putting it into her pocket to read later.

  Carmen made some entries into the computer, and told Carolyn the cremation costs ranged from $300 to $700, and she had her choice of styles of urns.

  Carolyn chose a small jar. Gracie would rest on the window ledge overlooking Eighth Street, where she had always liked to look out. It would take about three weeks for the ashes to come back, Carmen told her.

  As Carolyn stood to leave, Carmen said, “Say, could you do us a favor?”

  Carolyn couldn’t imagine what sort of favor the clinic would want of her.

  “We have a few puppies that came in Sunday and we don’t have any room. You have a crate in your apartment, right?”

  Gracie’s old crate was in storage down in the basement, but Carolyn hesitated.

  Carmen clucked reassuringly. “It would just be for a few days. There was an apartment fire on Nostrand Avenue, and a whole bunch of dogs came in here, including these puppies. Some nearly died of asphyxiation. We can’t keep them all here, and so we’re asking some of our clients if they can take one for a couple of days.”

  It seemed disloyal to bring home another dog, even for a day or so. What would Gracie think, to see another dog in the apartment, just hours after she had died?

  Carmen seemed to read her mind. “No pressure, hon. But this would just be until we find a place for them. They’re nine weeks old, don’t even have names yet. We gave them all their shots, though.”

  Carmen was forging ahead, guiding Carolyn’s arm, the two of them walking to the rear, past the examining rooms, the surgical suite, the crates for sick and boarding dogs. When they got to the end of the hallway, Carmen turned the knob on an aluminum door, and they entered a small, dimly lit space, not much bigger than a broom closet. There were six crates in the room, two of them holding puppies.

  “We call this the Last Resort room, where the hard cases and lost causes go,” she said. “Some of the techs can’t even bear to come in here, since this is where the dogs and cats go when people don’t pick them up or when people bring them in off the street. The fire department brought these in Sunday.”

  Carmen switched on the overhead light and went over to one of the crates full of squirming puppies, and opened the top, reaching in and pulling out one of the dogs.

  “This one’s a female, very sweet, very social. There was some coughing and vomiting from smoke, but now she’s okay.”

  Carmen put the puppy down on the table. She was a fat little thing, with piercing eyes. She yawned, then her tail began wagging when she looked up at Carolyn, meeting her eyes. The pup scrambled toward her, and Carolyn picked her up. She was brown and black, some sort of shepherd-collie mix. She was soft and so warm. Carolyn felt her heart rising in her chest.

  “I’m calling her Faith,” said Carmen. “Because we have to have faith that she’ll get a home.”

  “Or Hope,” Carolyn said.

  “Or Hope,” Carmen agreed.

  Carolyn leaned forward, almost touching noses with the puppy, who licked her face. She drank in the puppy smell, closing her eyes.

  Carmen was busy tending to the other puppies. With her back to Carolyn, she said, “A lot of people come in here and tell me they can’t go through it again, aren’t sure they can handle losing a dog again. But lots of dogs need homes, lots of people need dogs. Life goes on, right, honey?”

  Carolyn pressed the puppy’s head beneath her chin. Hope licked her face, sighed, then went to sleep.

  There was no way she could put the puppy into that smelly old suitcase, which she realized she would probably throw away as soon as she got home. She tucked the puppy under her coat, right below her neck, leaving room for her to breathe.

  As they walked out together, Carmen wished her good luck, gave her a hug, and then locked the door behind her.

  Carolyn headed for the subway with the puppy under her coat, pulling the empty suitcase behind her. At the top of the entrance, she paused. She didn’t think she could endure that again. She saw a yellow cab cruising by with its lights on, so she lifted her right hand, even though cabs were for Wall Street types and tourists, in her mind. The cabbie—a young, chubby, dark-skinned man—asked if she wanted the suitcase to go in the trunk.

  No, she said, but the driver got out anyway to help her get it into the backseat. “Wow, it’s pretty light,” he said with a smile. “Short stay, huh?”

  She didn’t answer, her thoughts were on the cab fare, the cremation bill, on the food she had to buy for Hope. As the cab pulled away from the curb, there was a sharp yelp from inside her coat. Carolyn looked into the mirror and saw the quizzical eyes of the young driver.

  “I don’t mind,” he said. “Just don’t let it out.”

  She smiled, relieved.

  “New dog?” he asked. “I’ve got a yellow Lab. Trixie.”

  Carolyn had never been good with strangers, and hadn’t really talked to a man her age for a while. But she started talking now. She could hardly believe the words pouring out of her mouth. She told the driver—his named was Jared—about hauling the dead dog around in a suitcase, about the cops kicking her off the subway, about meeting Hope.

  Jared listened, nodding sympathetically. He turned off the meter at $4. “This trip won’t be expensive,” he said. “On the house.”

  They sat for nearly a half an hour in front of her building, discussing their dogs. Hope crawled out of Carolyn’s coat, and into the front seat, right into Jared’s lap while they talked.

  Jared asked if he could bring Trixie to meet Hope in Prospect Park on Saturday. It would be good for her to play with a puppy. Trixie was old and sick. He would have to face losing her soon.

  “Had to be rough,” he said, his face full of kindness and sympathy.

  “It is,” Carolyn said. And she thought of Gracie, suddenly, as a kind of love that just kept giving.

  “But life goes on, doesn’t it?”

  Yankee Dog

  LISABETH PULLED INTO THE DUNKIN’ DONUTS PARKING LOT promptly at 3:50 A.M. As assistant manager of the franchise’s first shift, it was her responsibility to fire the place up, turn on the heat, make sure the restrooms were clean, check the microphone in the drive-thru, start the coffee machines, and get the donuts in the oven.

  While scurrying from chore to chore, she liked to talk. This, she found, not only woke her up, but got everybody else going too. And the thing she always liked to talk about most was dogs.

  Lisabeth defined the periods of her life by the dogs she had had. When she first started working at DD, she had a Rottweiler named Tigger, a sweet-hearted nightmare of a dog that terrorized the neighborhood and finally lost a confrontation with a garbage truck. That was a tough time for her. Her mother was sick, her husband, Frank, was out of work, and they were dead broke.

  And then there was Rutabaga, a small mutt of indeterminable origins, who came to work with her during the seven years she spent on the late shift, sitting outside in her car, barking at everything and nothing until cl
osing time at midnight. This was when her two kids were little and she was struggling to be a good mom while holding down two jobs. Rutabaga always seemed to think she was doing just fine.

  She had a snapshot of Casey, her golden, up on the counter above the window where she served the early risers and commuters who came through the drive-thru. Photos of all of her dogs were up on her refrigerator at home. Casey had marked Lisabeth’s move into middle age, her kids growing up, and some of the fun going out of her marriage. Frank had always been a quiet, low-key man, but in recent years he had become withdrawn, losing himself—or hiding maybe—in sports, especially the New York Yankees, whose every game he watched with almost obsessive attention. Sometimes, he forgot their anniversary or her birthday, but he always knew the standings, batting averages, and the combined ERA of the Yankee pitching staff by heart. And maybe he was jealous of all the pets. Every dog or cat that she’d brought into the house had been a pitched battle until a year ago, when her beloved Casey died of liver cancer.

  Frank, a night-shift supervisor at a meatpacking warehouse, had put his foot down after $2,400 in vet bills. That was it, he said. No more dog food. No more ruined couches. No more diarrhea on his grandmother’s rug. No more walks in the rain and snow. No more dog hair on his sweatshirts and pants. No more peeing on the kitchen floor. No more pretzels snatched from the TV table.

  No more listening to Lisabeth coo to Casey like she once had to him when they first started dating, in what he always called the “empty years,” the time before Steinbrenner, the years when the Yankees weren’t in it, weren’t trying.

  No more dogs.

  Relationships, Lisabeth told Jeannie, her dawn-at-the-drive-thru colleague, were all about the little things, the small gestures, the thoughtfulness, and occasional endearments. These days, Frank didn’t do any of those things. As he was fond of pointing out, he grew up in a house where there was a hot meal waiting for him every night, and he expected the same from his wife. At least he hoped for it. But, Lisabeth said, laughing, he rarely got it. She wasn’t much of a cook, and was usually working at one job or another, something he did appreciate.

  God forbid, she thought, he would ever get up and make both of them a hot meal. That was not something he ever saw in his mother’s house.

  There was a kind of holding-the-line quality to their life. If their marriage wasn’t exactly a fairy tale, it wasn’t the worst either. They were nice to each other, offered sanctuary to their two kids, and managed to scrape up enough money to get to Lake George for two weeks every September.

  Sometimes, during their twenty-nine years of marriage, Lisabeth’s love of animals had made the difference for her, even if Frank was never interested. “They just find me,” she told him, but his response was always the same: “Let them go find somebody else.”

  Until recently, Lisabeth had always found some way to get them in the house. But this time was different. Frank was really putting his foot down.

  “So what are you going to do about a new dog?” asked Jeannie. Jeannie lived with her mother, and had four cats and two rescue dogs, and to be quite honest, she couldn’t imagine a life with only people—with Frank, in particular—and no animals.

  “I don’t know,” said Lisabeth. “Frank says no animals, no more dogs. He says we can’t afford it. And he’s probably right.”

  Jeannie looked up at the screen to see how many coffees she had to make. “No animals?” Her tone was incredulous.

  Lisabeth took an order—double latte, six glazed, three apple-cranberry muffins, two medium hot coffees, light and sweet.

  “Pull up to the window, please,” she told the customer.

  “Do you have to tell him?”

  Lisabeth laughed. “Well, honey, you can’t exactly sneak a beagle into the house and keep it a secret.”

  Lisabeth reached behind her for her sack of the donut holes, saved as occasional treats for dogs. It was an unofficial policy at DD to give a Munchkin to a dog if the owner asked. Mostly, they were given for free. Dogs everywhere were excited to see a DD.

  Lisabeth thought she had heard a dog barking through the microphone. A minute later, an SUV pulled up, and the big head of Bailey, the Lab, was sticking out the rear window. Feeding the dogs was the best part of her job, she thought. There were about a dozen regulars, and Jim, the manager, liked to joke that you would have thought all of their customers were dogs. Lisabeth never laughed at that. The dogs were always happy to see her, and they didn’t mumble into the intercom, rush their orders, squawk about mix-ups, prices, or the time it took to make a cup of coffee.

  She turned to Jeannie. “I was on Petfinder again last night, and they got a beautiful dog, a rescue beagle with the biggest brown eyes you ever saw. He’s healthy, and got his shots. His owner died of a stroke, and he was found starving in the house. Housebroken and all. A sweetie, they say.”

  “But Frank said ‘no more dogs,’ ” Jeannie said, filling the coffee orders at her station next to the microphone.

  “I know, I know,” said Lisabeth.

  Jeannie shook her head, silently grateful she didn’t have a husband telling her what dogs or cats she couldn’t get. She’d had two husbands in her life, and neither of them were worth a single one of her cats.

  “The rescue people are coming to the mall to meet me after work.”

  “You don’t have to go,” Jeannie said, putting the lids on the coffees.

  Lisabeth took two more orders, and then checked the monitors. “Yeah, and birds don’t have to fly.”

  LISABETH AND JEANNIE PULLED into the southernmost parking lot by the Wedgewood Mall, the biggest in the county, and waited for the blue minivan coming up from North Carolina Beagle Rescue.

  “There it is,” Jeannie called out. Lisabeth flashed her lights, and the van swerved over to them.

  Janet, the driver, introduced herself before opening the sliding door. Inside, there was considerable baying and howling. Lisabeth looked in and a beautiful beagle looked back at her, his tail thumping wildly behind him.

  Janet closed the door. “They get too excited,” she said. But Lisabeth knew that wasn’t the real reason Janet closed the door. It was in case things didn’t work out; Janet didn’t want the dogs to get their hopes up.

  Lisabeth didn’t hesitate. “I’ll take him.”

  Jeannie looked at her, a bit startled after listening all day to how Frank would never go for it.

  Janet took out a form and asked Lisabeth a lot of questions. Did she have a fence? What kind of food did she use? Would she pledge to neuter the dog? How often was she home? What kind of training method did she use? Would she get the dog shots every year? Were there kids in the house? Old people? What did her husband think? Did he want the dog? Would she allow a representative to come and visit the dog? Would she walk him three times a day?

  Lisabeth had been through this before, and mostly told the truth. Janet went through her drill, they exchanged forms, and Lisabeth handed over a $50 donation. Janet said she had four more dogs to drop off, all the way up to the Canadian border, so she gratefully accepted the coffee and donuts Lisabeth and Jeannie had brought over from DD.

  After walking around to the back of the van to get the dog, Janet opened the crate and fastened a leash to his collar. The dog, about three years old, hurtled out of the van and began sniffing Lisabeth’s sneakers, his tail going like an airplane propeller.

  “They’re nose dogs, you know,” said Janet, “so they’re not always the most obedient creatures. Especially if they smell something.”

  She said the dog’s name was Owen. Mostly, his elderly owner and he had watched TV. He got along well with other dogs—she didn’t know about cats—but he seemed relatively easygoing, at least for a beagle.

  Lisabeth was on her knees, not listening much; she was too busy rubbing her hands along the side of Owen’s head. She pulled a handful of biscuits out of her pocket, and the dog wolfed them down hungrily.

  “This is going to work,” she said, and t
he dog seemed to look at her in agreement.

  LISABETH PULLED into the driveway of her small split-level. Frank’s battered old Chevy pickup was in the driveway. From the car, she saw the TV lights flickering in the living room—the big flat screen she and the kids had gotten Frank last summer as the Yankees charged toward the World Series and flopped along the way. If she’d known they were going to be wiped out by the Angels, she would have gotten him a country-western CD, maybe Hank Williams. Or a DVD about Derek Jeter.

  Her heart was racing a bit. Frank wasn’t a bad guy, not really. And he had permitted a lot of dogs and who-knows-how-many cats over the years. But since Casey had passed, the loneliness had been cutting, something she could feel, like a big dark hole that sometimes felt as though it was becoming her life.

  The beagle hopped out of the car and immediately put his nose to the ground, circling and circling, before following her to the back door. Lisabeth stopped, then headed into the garage. She began to tremble. He would never go for this; he would make her take this poor little guy right over to the county shelter on Route 50, where they would put him in a cage. If he was in a good mood, he might just let her call the rescue people and arrange to have the dog picked up. Janet had assured her that they would take the dog back if there was any trouble.

  “Owen,” she whispered, “just be still.” He looked up at her with those mournful eyes.

  She rummaged in the boxes lining the shelves of the garage, and the dog followed her, watching her pocket—a biscuit came out often enough to keep him focused.

  She called Jeannie on her cell.

  “Has he seen the dog yet?”

  “No, but Jeannie, I’m scared. I’m just scared.” She felt her eyes welling up with tears. “It isn’t just the dog. I’m fifty-two years old, and I’m scared of my own husband. I hate being scared like that.”

  Jeannie told her she would come and get the dog if she wished, or go with her into the house, but Lisabeth said thanks, but no. She’d deal with it.

  She turned off the cell phone, wiped her eyes on the sleeve of her orange DD shirt, and pulled the dog to her side. He looked at her curiously, but he was game, it seemed, if she was.