Dancing Dogs

by Jon Katz

  On the second day of her vigil, the cat approached the farmer’s wife, sniffed her hand, and allowed her to stroke the back of her head. The cat purred.

  “You look tired,” the woman told the cat. “I wish you’d come into the house once in a while. Remember when there were three feet of snow on the ground, and it was almost thirty below? I opened the basement door and put down some food and a bed for you, but you just walked away. Remember that?”

  The farmer’s wife could feel the love for this cat swelling in her heart. She admired her courage, her independence, and her loyalty. She was beautiful, not ratty and worn down like some barn cats. But she also feared the cat’s vulnerability. She knew what happened to barn cats. They simply vanished one day. All of them. There was never a trace. They were just gone. She didn’t want that to happen to this cat. She couldn’t bear it. This one was special.

  She wondered at the very strange relationship that had developed between this wild and undomesticated creature and the dutiful rooster who had watched over his hens and crowed religiously—and loudly—for so many years. Now it was the barn cat who was dutiful, keeping her faithful death-watch.

  The farmer visited the two friends every morning, and his wife came in two or three times during the day and once just before bed. The rooster grew perceptibly weaker, and still the cat didn’t leave his side.

  Late one night, after the farmer and his wife were asleep and the woods and barns were quiet, the rooster’s heartbeat became faint, and he began to struggle for breath. He raised his head to look at his hens, and then at the barn cat beside him. She felt his heart stop and his breathing quiet. Almost instantly, his body began to grow cold. She felt a strange, unfamiliar sensation, unease that was almost like sadness, isolation that was almost like loneliness.

  Then she stood up, hopped onto one of the wooden beams that held the hay, and leapt up onto one of the bales. With no time to brace herself, she soared straight up into the air and caught a barn swallow in full flight, the bird stunned and in her mouth before it even noticed her presence.

  She jumped back down and dropped the dead bird down onto the ground near the rooster’s head.

  THE NEXT MORNING, the farmer’s wife came in with some oatmeal—the temperature had plunged to fifteen degrees. The old rooster was dead, stretched out on the wooden pallet, his eyes closed. The cat was still pressed against him, as if passing him her warmth. A foot away was a dead barn swallow, stiff and cold. The cat turned to watch the woman.

  The farmer’s wife disappeared into a corner of the barn and returned with a shovel and a garbage bag. She scooped up the rooster and the bird and deposited them both into the bag.

  She looked over at the cat. “What did you do? Bring him a gift?” She smiled and shook her head. Then she carried the bag out to the trash heap, which her husband would later collect with his tractor and dump into a hole in the back of the pasture. The coyotes and vultures and other scavengers would make quick work of the rooster’s carcass.

  When she returned to the barn, she sat down near the cat with the steaming bowl of oatmeal. “Good job,” she told the cat, who looked up at her, then padded over to sniff at the oatmeal. The cat was disoriented; she seemed to be looking around for the rooster, waiting for him to appear. She meowed, as if calling out for him.

  “You’ll miss your friend,” the farmer’s wife told the cat. She isn’t likely to find another, not the way she lives, she thought silently.

  “You can come into the house anytime you want,” the woman said. “Your life is hard and you’ve done enough.”

  The cat came over and sniffed her hand, but when the farmer’s wife reached for her, she vanished into the dark stacks of square bales.

  Ernie and the Bottled-Water Contest

  FROM HER PHARMA-RITE CASHIER STATION, KAREN COULD PEER out the door and look across the highway—through the whizzing trucks and cars—to her aging blue Corolla. She couldn’t actually see Ernie, her noisy five-year-old Boston terrier (though often she could hear his distinctive high-pitched barking), or Napoleon, her imperious orange tabby; they were tucked away on their beds in the animal encampment in the rear of the car.

  But she believed they could see her, and thus know she was all right. She knew Ernie worried about her when they were apart.

  Sometimes when her boss, Jim, the assistant manager of the store, was in the storeroom or taking delivery of some orders, she would run out into the parking lot so her “guys” could see her more clearly. Or to make sure they were safe. In the summer, she parked the car in shade and left the windows open (she had a portable fan working from the backseat on particularly hot days), and in the winter, she always parked in the sun. Despite these precautions, she couldn’t help looking in on them a few times a day. She felt guilty about leaving the animals out in the car.

  At times, when she thought nobody was listening, and even when she knew they were, she would yodel at Ernie from the edge of the highway. “Hey, Ernie, odel-odel-lay-he-hooo!” she would warble. It was their secret signal, a distinctive sound he could pick up on. She didn’t have a sound for Napoleon the cat. But cats didn’t really need that kind of reassurance.

  The yodeling brought surprised and sometimes disapproving stares from people driving by and from customers in the store parking lot, but Karen, a wiry, brown-haired woman with a leathery face and bright green eyes, was not bothered. If they were dog people, they would understand. And if they were not, then she didn’t care what they thought anyway. Ernie was her heart, pure and simple.

  The girls working next to her teased her mercilessly whenever she went outside to check on Ernie and Napoleon. “You got a guy out there? You can’t be waving to a dog!” they would jeer, but she just laughed them off.

  It was clear that Ernie and Napoleon disliked each other. Ernie growled whenever the cat came near him, and the cat spent most of the day hissing at the dog. He was a worthless intruder in her eyes. (Yes, her eyes. Karen was constantly explaining to people that she knew Napoleon Bonaparte was a man, but she hadn’t known it when she named the cat and wasn’t about to change her name now.)

  Napoleon disliked riding in cars almost as much as she disliked Ernie. But Karen made her come so Ernie would have company out there in the Corolla. Even if they didn’t like each other, at least they weren’t alone. She imagined they brought some comfort to each other. And Napoleon did at least like sunning herself through the back window.

  IT WAS THE FIRST DAY of the Pharma-Rite Regional Bottled-Water Contest. Karen had come to work at three thirty A.M., even though her shift didn’t start until five. She put on a crisp blue Pharma-Rite vest and checked out the twelve cases of bottled water she had undertaken to sell that week. Each case had twelve bottles—she had a lot to move. The contest began at eight A.M.; no sales before that counted. The winner got a good crack at promotion to department manager, and Karen was hoping to get Cosmetics, one of the busiest departments in the store.

  She came in at four A.M. most mornings to sort out the shelves—it was unbelievable how people liked to pick things up and put them down in the wrong place. “Slobs,” she muttered. Would they do that at home? Put dish soap in the linen closet or a towel in the refrigerator? But she loved that quiet time in the store, tidying up, checking stock, getting the place ready to open. Once the doors opened at six A.M., she worked the drive-thru window where people on their way to work dropped off their prescriptions in the plastic pneumatic tubes.

  Most of the jobs at Pharma-Rite were pretty much by the numbers, as easily done by teenagers as adults. That was why the turnover was so high and the pay so low. But at the drive-thru, she got to chat with people and even see their dogs once in a while. She kept a box of biscuits by her chair and always tucked one in the tube when there was a dog in the car. She knew a bunch of the pet owners by name, or at least by the names of their dogs.

  She had some regulars she looked forward to seeing—Spinner, the border collie; Tar, the black Lab; and Wrigley, the golden,
were among her favorites. She told their owners about Ernie, and how she wished he could be in the back parking lot where he would be closer. He would enjoy seeing the other dogs, she knew, even if he did bark at every dog he saw. And every person.

  Halfway through her shift she switched to the front-of-store cashier stations. She had fun up front too. She always tried to make some small talk with the customers. She had a good word or thought for everybody, little bright spots to help people get through long and tough days. Warrensburg was a poor town in the Adirondacks, and the faces of many of the people she saw were tired, worn. If she could get a smile out of someone, it was a good thing.

  At the checkout counter, Karen wielded her wand like a maestro’s at the symphony. She almost danced around the things people bought—the jars of lotion, Band Aids and tissues, medications and stationery. She knew just how to angle the wand to scan the price, and she prided herself on her thoughtful and efficient packing of those shapeless plastic bags. When she said, “Have a good day,” she meant it, and she loved to say something nice about the scarves, pins, or hairstyles of the older women who came in to get their prescriptions filled. Most of them smiled and nodded. The teen customers were hopeless—they didn’t interact with her in any way. She just wished them all a safe and happy day.

  Karen had enjoyed swiping credit cards before Pharma-Rite installed the new machines that allowed the customers to swipe their own cards. Truth was, she liked it when the electronic cash system went down—which it did frequently—and you actually had to look at the prices of things and talk to people. She noticed that the kids who worked in the store moved from one automated job to another, reading instructions off screens. They didn’t really know how to talk to people. They let the wands do their talking and thinking, and barely muttered the required “Have a good day.” That was a shame, Karen thought.

  Sometimes, waving the wand back and forth, she felt like a robot with no real reason to know the products or talk to humans. She always asked people if they’d found what they wanted, or if she could help them in any way, but customers would keep coming to the Pharma-Rite even if she didn’t. The company had recently installed a fully automated checkout system that digitally tallied shoppers’ purchases. The total—reduced by a 15 percent discount—flashed on a screen, and the customer paid with a swiped credit card. People bagged their stuff themselves. Karen had no doubt that that was the future, but she fought the idea that companies no longer cared about people and people no longer cared about companies. You make your own story, she kept telling herself. And she cared.

  Karen worked to remain outgoing and helpful. Since the recession, more and more people came to Pharma-Rite to ask health questions and buy over-the-counter medications. They couldn’t afford to go see doctors or fill prescriptions. The staff wasn’t supposed to give out medical advice, but sometimes you really couldn’t help it. Karen would suggest skin creams, effective headache medications, and the stuff that seemed to work for colds, flu, eczema, sore joints. Rather than recommend medicines outright, which was a fireable offense, she simply said it worked for her.

  And she had a special radar for the dog people. When customers saw the locket with Ernie’s photo hanging from her necklace, they would often take out their cell phones and show her pictures of their own dogs or cats. She liked that. Her cell had a dozen photos of Ernie, and she could whip it out as fast as anybody.

  Karen had started bringing Ernie to work over a year ago. His obsessive barking was driving the neighbors crazy, and they had threatened to call the police. Karen wasn’t about to crate him (like that would keep him from barking anyway) or use one of those anti-barking spray collars, even though the vet said it was perfectly safe. Her husband, Dan, who thought Ernie was a dreadful pain in the ass, said they couldn’t leave him alone in the house any longer.

  This annoyed Karen for several reasons. A year earlier, Dan had suffered a mild heart attack. Minutes before it happened, Ernie had started to bark furiously. It was obvious to Karen that Ernie had sensed something was wrong and was trying to warn Dan. But her husband was unappreciative, even ungrateful. “Karen,” he scoffed, “that dog barks at everything.”

  Since then, Karen had watched Ernie’s reaction to people closely, and she firmly believed he could sense things others couldn’t. She had read about dogs who could sniff out cancer, predict death, warn of strokes. About dogs who saw right through people, who were spiritual and profound. She truly believed Ernie might be one of those dogs. She had faith in him, and believed she alone understood what he was trying to communicate.

  But despite Ernie’s special gifts, Dan would not back down about leaving the dog alone in the house. So Karen had rearranged the back of the car, laid out dog and cat beds, bones and catnip toys, water and snacks. Ernie could bark all he wanted in the parking lot across from the store, and nobody would care. On her breaks and lunch hour, she would go out and visit the “odd couple,” as she called them, walking Ernie and letting Napoleon sit on the hood of the car, where she glowered at the world.

  KAREN’S FIRST CUSTOMER of the day was a school-bus driver getting some groceries from Pharma-Rite’s new “Food Corner.” He bought a six-pack of beer, two packs of bubble gum, two glazed donuts, barbecue potato chips, an apple wrapped in cellophane, six $3 lottery tickets, and a pack of cigarettes.

  “And do you have any Tums?” he asked.

  “Duh!” muttered Karen under her breath, but he didn’t hear her.

  Sometimes, when she was out of earshot of the bosses, she joked that she had figured out Pharma-Rite’s secret corporate strategy: Sell a lot of chips, hot dogs, candy, cigarettes, and beer so that people would come in for prescriptions when they got fat and sick. There was no health-food department at this pharmacy.

  “Should we be selling cigarettes?” she would ask Jim, who just shrugged and said it was up to Corporate. Jim was not a guy to question Corporate. He was a large nervous man who desperately tried to keep up with the stream of regulations, ideas, and cost-saving strategies from Corporate. They never stopped coming.

  Truth was, prescriptions were only a small part of what Pharma-Rite was about these days—they sold food, toys, cosmetics, soaps and detergents, you name it. Even pet food and toys.

  “Hey, can I interest you in some of our new bottled water?” Karen asked the bus driver.

  “No,” he said groggily. “I don’t buy water.”

  That was sort of the tone of things. She wasn’t selling many bottles.

  Karen was lucky to have her cashier’s job. She needed it. But she was also fearful about her future. Employees were entitled to health-care benefits after four years at Pharma-Rite, and Karen, along with everybody else, noticed that people tended to get laid off or downsized right before their benefits kicked in. Any kid off the street could perform most of the jobs at Pharma-Rite with little training and less pay. Why keep on the employees who had earned benefits?

  Karen was in her fourth year at the store, and life was catching up—her mother was sick, Dan’s legs were getting worse, and jobs were vanishing as fast as the ozone layer. She needed to get one of the department-manager slots that the company was posting. The Warrensburg store was one of the smaller ones in the region, dwarfed by the volume done in Saratoga or Glens Falls. That’s why the Pharma-Rite Regional Bottled-Water Contest was looming large for Karen, and for her boss, Jim.

  The company was launching its own bottled-water brand. Part of the sales push was the contest. Employees who sold the most bottled water that week went to the top of the list for promotion. And Karen was going for it. Walmart wasn’t hiring, and the only other jobs around were eighty miles down the thruway in Saratoga, and there weren’t many of those.

  In their apartment in Hudson Falls, Karen had been driving Dan crazy practicing various sales pitches, getting her voice “up,” and memorizing the company pamphlets extolling the miraculous benefits of their clean, pure water. It had to be better than beer and cigarettes, she thought, practic
ing one of her pitches on Ernie.

  She’d adopted the dog at a local Adirondack animal shelter after some summer people abandoned him outside the cottage they had rented, just dumped him out on the road. A neighbor saw them do it and could hardly believe it. He called in their license-plate number. A trooper actually pulled them over on the New York State Thruway heading to New Jersey. “What dog?” they said. They might have seen one wandering around, but they knew nothing about it. It wasn’t theirs. There was nothing the trooper could do. Maybe Ernie’s abandonment explained why he was so verbal, so indignant. Perhaps he was still seething at the injustices done to him.

  “Their loss, my gain,” Karen said of the awful people who had abandoned Ernie. She and the dog had bonded instantly, and she brought him everywhere but the doctor’s office and her mother’s nursing home. She loved him to death, and he had become pretty much a one-human dog. He was either with Karen or barking in protest that he wasn’t with Karen.

  “Ernie,” she had told him that morning, “I need to win this contest. Get that promotion. Get us noticed by Corporate.” She didn’t want to be one of the many checkout girls who vanished from Pharma-Rite after four years. She wanted to make it past that expiration date. She wanted to get benefits, better pay, and some job security, if such a thing even existed. Maybe even get to go to the annual meeting in Fort Meyers, Florida, one day, or win a cruise.

  In the locker room, the other girls had wished one another luck as they pulled their hair back in buns and ponytails and put on their blue vests. Karen was competing with Susie from Cosmetics and Jamie, a pill counter in the pharmacy, but her real competitors probably worked at the larger stores in the region. Still, Susie and Jamie were both cute and quite a bit younger than Karen, who was in her mid-forties. They had boyfriends and pals who came by all the time. They might draw more of a crowd than she did.