Dancing Dogs

by Jon Katz

  The first day of the contest was a disaster for Karen. She called Dan on the cell and told him that nobody seemed to want bottled water from Pharma-Rite, even at $5.99 a case. Jamie’s boyfriend came into the parking lot on his motorbike and bought a couple of cases. Karen hadn’t come close to that. On her break, she had gone out to see the odd couple and walked Ernie around the block. She didn’t take him as far as she usually did, wanting to get back and sell some bottles.

  Some of her regulars bought a few, but by early afternoon, she had barely sold a case.

  Tuesday was not much better. Jim came to check on her numbers and he shook his head. He was nervous, unhappy. “Your competition is outselling you,” he said, “and they aren’t selling much.” Karen prided herself on being upbeat, but Jim was a difficult person for even her to like. He seemed to care about nothing but his faraway bosses and their business goals, and was careful not to get too close to any employees—they might not be around for long. Still, Karen was easy to talk to, and Jim sometimes confided a bit in her. “I’ll be honest with you—it would be nice to beat out Saratoga and Glens Falls. Get Corporate to notice us. We aren’t exactly their busiest store around here, if you know what I mean.”

  Karen knew what he meant. Stores that were not the busiest ones often vanished overnight, taking everybody’s jobs with them. Jim said the chain’s regional manager was a big fan of Chairman Mao of China, and he believed in getting rid of the weakest links every now and then to keep the chain strong. It was a chilling management philosophy, all the more so because Karen knew it was true.

  Karen’s sister had stopped by and picked up a few bottles, to be nice. Susie gave her a condescending smirk. Everybody knew she wasn’t selling any water. If this kept up, she’d have to start looking online for jobs in Saratoga or Lake George. Karen was discouraged, which didn’t happen often. Her mother had taught her that being discouraged was like opening up a dark door—it let awful stuff in. You just didn’t do it.

  On Wednesday morning, Dan called her on the cell to wish her well. “Maybe you can put that useless dog to work,” he said. “He drinks a lot of water.”

  She knew his suggestion had only been a snide joke—he was not a huge fan of Ernie—but it set something off inside her head. She took the dog for a long walk out by the cement plant, where the two of them looked up, as they did every day, at the giant Days Without Accidents or Injuries sign that towered over the neighborhood. The cement plant had not had an accident or injury in more than one thousand days, and that meant something to Karen. She saw the sign as something akin to a spiritual site, a place of safety and stability in the world.

  …

  ON THURSDAYS Karen worked a later shift, four P.M. to midnight, so Jim and the other early employees (she suspected that Jim lived in the office at the back of the store, as she had never seen him come or go, only work) were surprised to see her pull into the Pharma-Rite parking lot at six A.M. She’d left Napoleon at home, and the grumpy cat had seemed more than pleased to stay.

  Ernie, however, was sitting in the backseat, yapping away.

  She had gussied him up, giving him a bath, which he hated, putting sweet-smelling powder on him, and placing a yellow Hawaiian lei (a souvenir from her sister’s last trip to Disney World) around his neck.

  Jim frowned. He didn’t like dogs in general and Ernie in particular. Company policy and state health laws banned them from the store, and Jim didn’t even like them hanging around the parking lot, which is why Karen always parked across the street. Jim insisted that somebody could get bit, or worse, the dog would take a dump—not the image Pharma-Rite wanted to project.

  “You can’t leave him this close to the store,” he said.

  Karen motioned for Jim to step aside.

  “Listen,” she said. “Do you want to win the Regional Bottled-Water Contest or not?”

  Jim’s eyes widened. It would be a huge coup for a small store in Warrensburg to beat the busier Pharma-Rites in Glens Falls or Saratoga. One of his buddies down at the Glens Falls store had e-mailed him to tell him that Corporate had called to chastise the manager for not pushing the contest. They were ticked about the sluggish sales of their new water line in its first week.

  “Just bear with me,” said Karen. She went to the stationery section and came out with a blank cardboard poster and some crayons, then went and got Ernie out of the car. He sat barking, wagging his tail.

  She scribbled on the poster and then set it up in the parking lot against the rear wall of the store.

  “Psychic Dog,” it read. “Let Ernie tell your fortune. Free with the purchase of two bottles of water.”

  Before Jim could close his mouth, there were six people in line.

  “Is this for real?” asked a mom with two kids in tow. “I saw a dog like this on Oprah.”

  “Try it,” challenged Karen. “Ask him anything you want to know about your future.”

  The woman walked up to Ernie, who looked up at her. She glanced back at her kids, closed her eyes, tilted her face toward the sky, and then took a breath.

  “Will my husband get a job?” she finally asked. Ernie looked up at her and began to bark.

  “Wow,” said the woman. “It’s like he really listened to me. What did he say?”

  Karen forced herself to remind the customer that while the predictions were free, the water wasn’t. Two bottles, $2.25.

  The woman took out her purse and bought three bottles. Ernie barked at her again.

  “So what did he say?” she asked Karen again as her two kids drew in closer.

  “Ernie says absolutely. Your husband will definitely get a job.”

  The woman smiled and one of the kids squealed, “Awesome! Wait until we get home and tell Daddy!”

  A truck driver stepped to the front of the line and bought two bottles.

  Ernie barked and the driver looked at him dubiously. “I had a mutt who drove with me for ten years,” he said. “Looked a little like him.”

  Karen saw that the man’s eyes had filled with tears. “Hey,” she asked, “what’s your question?”

  “Will it cost me more than five hundred dollars to get the transmission on my truck fixed?”

  Karen listened to Ernie bark.

  “No” said Karen. “Ernie says less than that.”

  Next, a middle-aged woman came up to the dog, looked him in the eye, and bought a whole case of bottled water. She looked worn. Karen waited while the woman summoned the strength to speak up.

  “Will my mother recover from her cancer?” she asked.

  This was too much for Jim. Before Karen could say a word, he stepped forward and whispered, “Karen, we can’t have this. These people will be furious if the predictions don’t come true. They’ll come back and sue us.”

  He tried to give the women her money back, but she put up her hand and looked right into Ernie’s eyes. “No,” she said, “I want an answer.”

  Karen listened to Ernie’s barks, and then, with a strange look in her eye, threw her arms around the woman and said, “Your mother will recover, at least for a while.” The woman burst into tears.

  Jim ordered Karen to put Ernie in the car and go home.

  She picked up the dog and moved him to the rear seat, muttering under her breath. It wasn’t until she was a mile or so from Pharma-Rite that she became terrified she would lose her job.

  In fact, she wasn’t sure if she’d already been fired or not. Jim hadn’t said either way.

  Once home, Dan was furious. “How could you do that?” he thundered. “This dog doesn’t know squat. He isn’t a psychic. He was just shooting his mouth off, like he always does. You’re giving these people false hope.”

  Karen said nothing, but burst into tears. Had she lost her job? Misled people? Lost her mind? It started as a bottled-water contest, and there, out in the parking lot with Ernie, she had kind of lost perspective. But she wasn’t lying. She believed Ernie knew more than most dogs. She was sure of it.

  She
went into her room and put her head on the pillow and cried. She would never get promoted, and couldn’t even imagine getting to keep her job. At least Jim hadn’t called to fire her yet. He was probably waiting for the morning. Ernie, puzzled, lay on the bed next to her. He was quiet for once. Napoleon looked on disdainfully.

  The next morning, Karen got up early, drove to the Pharma-Rite, and left Ernie and Napoleon in the car across the road from the store. She went through the aisles, putting bottles of lotion back in their proper places, picking up the bags of chocolate and cough drops that had been knocked to the floor. Then she took her place at the drive-thru window, and when she was done, reported to her cashier station. Her hands were trembling but there was still no sign of Jim.

  Karen looked out the window to see if Ernie was all right and noticed a small commotion in the parking lot. There were about a dozen people there—a big crowd at that hour—and Jim was standing out there in his Pharma-Rite manager’s vest trying to placate them. Karen asked her friend Janine to cover her station and stepped outside.

  The first person she saw was the mother with her two children. She clapped her hands when she spotted Karen. “My husband got a job yesterday,” she said. “Your dog is miraculous. I want to buy some more water.”

  The truck driver was right behind her. “Me too,” he said. “The transmission work cost two hundred fifty. How did the dog do it? I want to ask him about a new car I want to buy.” Karen looked around for the woman whose mother had cancer, but she didn’t see her.

  There was a line now, halfway across the lot. She looked at Jim, who gave her a nod. “I wasn’t out here,” he said. “In case anybody asks, I was never here. I never saw this.” He looked down, shook his head, and retreated inside the store.

  Karen crossed the road to her car, got the sign and Ernie, and set up against the rear wall, just like the day before.

  She sold out of bottled water by noon. Jim stacked a few more cases. Ernie barked continuously, making a string of predictions: the local high school would win a football championship; a young wife would get pregnant; three women would get married; a boy would move out of his mother’s house and live near the ocean; a divorce-court judge would rule in favor of a father’s custody plea; a hunter would get some deer. The words just came streaming out of Karen’s mouth, and she was sure they were from Ernie. Bottles of water kept selling.

  Every now and then Jim would come out with another stack of bottled-water cases, then flee. In the mid-afternoon, he appeared again, practically glowing. “We won. We beat Saratoga and Glens Falls. I get to go to the awards dinner Corporate is giving at the end of the month.”

  Karen had never seen Jim smile like that.

  He reached into his pocket and pulled out an “Employee of the Month” pin, plastic painted to look like brass. He told her she would get the “Employee of the Month” parking spot by the side of the store as well. And, he whispered, she was free to keep Ernie there. He winked, and then said, sotto voce, “Get used to the Cosmetics Department.”

  By late afternoon, the crowd had dispersed and Karen put Ernie back in the Corolla with Napoleon. She headed into the locker room to change out of her blue vest. When she left the store, the woman who had asked about her mother’s cancer was standing alone in the parking lot.

  Karen came up to her. “I hope I didn’t give you any false hope,” she said. “I’m not a doctor. I was up thinking about you all night. It just came out that way—”

  The woman smiled. “Last night, I went home and told my mom what the dog had said. She clapped her hands, got up out of bed, and said she wanted to go for a walk. We walked through the park and along the river, and she laughed and had some popcorn and smiled for me, and I will remember that smile for the rest of my life. I wanted to come and thank Ernie for making my mother smile.”

  For Minnie Cohen

  Acknowledgments

  Thanks to Elizabeth Stein, Rosemary Ahern, Jen Smith, Maria Wulf.

  Thanks to the families, farmers, and box-store women who let me into their lives, and allowed me to see what animals mean to them in contemporary America.

  By JON KATZ

  Dancing Dogs

  Lenore Finds a Friend

  Going Home

  Meet the Dogs of Bedlam Farm

  Rose in a Storm

  Soul of a Dog

  Izzy & Lenore

  Dog Days

  A Good Dog

  Katz on Dogs

  The Dogs of Bedlam Farm

  The New Work of Dogs

  A Dog Year

  Geeks

  Running to the Mountain

  Virtuous Reality

  Media Rants

  Sign Off

  Death by Station Wagon

  The Family Stalker

  The Last Housewife

  The Fathers’ Club

  Death Row

  About the Author

  JON KATZ has written twenty-one books—eight novels, one collection of short stories, and twelve works of nonfiction—including Soul of a Dog, Izzy & Lenore, Dog Days, A Good Dog, and The Dogs of Bedlam Farm. He has written for The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Slate, Rolling Stone, and the AKC Gazette. He has worked for CBS News, The Boston Globe, The Washington Post, and the Philadelphia Inquirer. Katz is also a photographer and the author of two children’s books, Meet the Dogs of Bedlam Farm and Lenore Finds a Friend. He lives on Bedlam Farm in upstate New York with his wife, the artist Maria Wulf; his dogs, Lenore, Frieda, and Red; his donkeys, Simon, Lulu, and Fanny; and his barn cats, Mother and Minnie.