Ruffly Speaking

by Conant, Susan

  “Raccoons are more likely to carry rabies than a dog is,” I said. “And rabies actually is spreading in Massachusetts. The biggest problem is that people are getting panicky.”

  “Oh, Morris wanted to get the poor things all vaccinated,” Doug said. “He was reading about Alpine foxes. He had some grand plan about feeding the raccoons some kind of Swiss rabies vaccine....”

  Silence fell at our table. Leah had the tact not to break it. Doug and I shared what seemed to me a moment of mourning. For all Morris’s frivolity, he cared about other living creatures, and he acted on his concern. It sounds corny to say that he’d risked his life to save a stranger, but the time he’d plunged into the Charles, that’s precisely what he’d done. Lots of animal lovers were worried that public panic about the spread of rabies would result in senseless efforts to eradicate raccoons, opossums, bats, and even properly vaccinated cats and dogs. Morris hadn’t merely felt sorry for the wild animals; he’d intended to protect the helpless raccoons in his own neighborhood.

  Maybe the grief for Morris was more than Doug could tolerate. “My staff!” He shot to his feet. “I have to see what they’re up to. If I don’t keep an eye on them every second,” he confided to Leah, “they do the most unbelievable things. Last week I caught Fyodor exiting the kitchen with a tray, and something about it looked peculiar to me, and I reached out and flipped open one of the sandwiches, and you’ll never believe what was in it! I almost passed out. Garbage! Some stupid boy in the kitchen had mixed it up with the crab salad! And Fyodor has been told a hundred thousand times to check every order just as if he were going to consume it himself, but with Fyodor, everything goes in one ear and out the other without tarrying in between. A garbage sandwich!”

  “The customer might not even have noticed,” Leah pointed out. Entirely ignorant of the circumstances and stories surrounding Morris Lamb’s death, she added innocently, “Some people don’t even notice. They’ll eat absolutely anything.”

  17

  Playing the dog show game without bragging is like passing Go without bothering to collect your two hundred dollars; if you give it a miss, you aren’t really playing at all. Everyone passes Go, of course, but not everyone has the good fortune to be the first to land on Boardwalk, and if you happen to be the lucky one, you’re not merely expected to snap it up, but considered a hopeless fool unless you promptly invest your all to up the rent from that token fifty dollars. If you’ve got a shot at Park Place? Buy! Add houses! Buy a hotel! Buy two! Monopoly is not some New Age game.

  Neither are dog shows. When American and Canadian Champion Malopoly’s Boardwalk Beauty, C.D-. T.T., W.P.D., goes Best of Breed at the Atlantic City Area Specialty, at a minimum you’re expected to send in the win to your area editor so it can appear in the “Something to Howl About” column of the Alaskan Malamute Club of America Newsletter. And when she’s linebred to

  Ch. Monolith’s Park Place? Or when you’re just so proud of her that a mere gratis newsletter howl won’t do? Well, what you do then is to take out a full-page ad in The Malamute Quarterly, which, like every other self-respecting breed-specific publication, provides its subscribers with an unparalleled opportunity to brag, brag, brag about their dogs in unbridled and endlessly satisfactory detail, an opportunity, I might add, completely denied to human parents.

  Really. Flip open an issue of The Malamute Quarterly, and what do you find? Right at the top of the page: Am/Can Ch. Malalong Cassidy, C.D.X., R.O.M., then a gorgeous show photo, and, underneath it, the dog’s OFA number and rating (excellent), CHD probability (almost zero), and the information that he’s CERF clear, then a four-generation pedigree, and maybe a list of his own impressive wins and achievements and those of his get, and then something like, “The foundation sire of Malalong Kennels, Cass is so ideal that he makes the standard look untypey. This dog has everything—beauty, brains, movement....” Brag, brag, brag! Check out The Borzoi Quarterly, The Irish Wolfhound Quarterly, Doberman World, The Corgi Cryer, any breed publication you like.

  With one exception. Which one? The one that doesn’t exist. Where, O where is The Human Being Quarterly? Baby World? Where is The Infant Cryer? Where are the wonderful advertisements, the gorgeous photos, and the strings of letters and numbers attesting to health, intelligence, and temperament? Where, where, where are the brags? Nowhere. Why? The answer, sad and obvious: The game of human children is Monopoly with no Go and no two hundred dollars, nothing to brag of at all.

  Or so I assumed until I met Ivan, whose last name was not, in fact, The Terrible, but Flynn-Isaacson. This boy seemed to me definitely to merit a costly spread in Kiddy Kennel Review. I’d observed Ivan’s foray into Alice Savery’s territory, but the date of our first real encounter was Wednesday, July 1. The place was the Avon Hill Summer Program. The occasion was a hands-on grooming workshop. The hands were those of Leah’s eight students. The on was Rowdy, who’d been drafted into service because he was both big enough to go around and sucker enough to tolerate what I imagined would be the inept swipes and yanks of sixteen brush-and-comb-wielding juvenile fists.

  Perhaps I should say outright that especially since I got involved with Malamute Rescue, I have come to resent young children. I don’t have anything against them per se or in vacuo, as one not only says in Cambridge, but says aloud, preferably in the hearing of other people. No, what I increasingly have against little children is the same thing I have against cats, a species I unequivocally like, per se and in vacuo. I keep getting all these phone calls from people who would make great adoptive owners of rescued Malamutes if only, only, only they didn’t have those damned babies. Or toddlers. The policy laid down by Betty Burley, the coordinator of our local rescue effort, is that we don’t place rescue dogs in families with young children. Period. If you ask Betty why, she’ll explain that we don’t know the entire life histories of the dogs. The truth is that Betty doesn’t trust parents. Neither do I, and with good reason: How far can you trust people ashamed to brag and too cheap to advertise?

  Back to Ivan. By ten-thirty on Wednesday morning, my portable grooming table was set up on the grass adjacent to Leah’s classroom at AHSP, and all eight of Leah’s little beasts, five girls and three boys, were simultaneously practicing their rudimentary grooming skills on what was undoubtedly the happiest Alaskan malamute ever to grace a Goodrich nonskid easy-clean vinyl surface, and that’s saying something. Rowdy is crazy about children, and if you avoid water to the extent of not even whisper-

  ing the word, he loves to be groomed. Once Leah’s campers, if you’ll pardon the gross expression, started carefully parting and brushing out their assigned sections of Rowdy’s coat, he would’ve been content to stand patiently, his feet firmly planted, for as long as they’d continue to stroke him.

  Leah had wisely assigned Rowdy’s head to the tallest child, a round-faced Asian girl named Mee Lee, who had a trace of an accent and the deft and gentle touch you’d expect in a professional groomer with ten years’ experience. Mee Lee was dressed in brand-new pink Oshkosh overalls and a matching flowered jersey; and the tiny red-haired girl dutifully working on Rowdy’s left foreleg foot wore a lavender shorts-and-top outfit with appliquéd butterflies that might as well have been arranged to spell out “I’m from the suburbs.” The remaining six were scruffy Cambridge whiz kids with rumpled unisex clothes and uncombed hair. A golden-eyed boy with coffee-colored skin and a plump, yellow-haired girl discovered that each had accompanied a parent to Cuba the previous winter. He went with his mother, she with her father. Neither child seemed even slightly surprised to learn that the other, too, had met Castro. Was I impressed? Not at all. Whenever I find myself in Havana, I always pop in for a nice gossip, of course, but I’d always supposed that adulthood had its privileges.

  Ivan, who’d been handed the vital but ignominious assignment of brushing Rowdy’s tail and anal area, didn’t mention any recent hobnobbing with Fidel. He made quite a powerful impression on me nonetheless. Except for those big, round violet-blue e
yes, he wasn’t much to look at, a scrawny, wiry kid whose brown hair still stuck up in the clumps and tufts I’d noticed the first time I’d seen him and evidently hadn’t been shampooed since. But as soon as I began to talk with him, I finally understood how he’d quickly become the focus of Leah and

  Matthew’s attention. Planted at Rowdy’s heavily furred rear end, Ivan carefully grasped the dog’s tail in his left hand, raised it, pointed an undercoat rake straight ahead, caught my eye, and demanded to know, first, whether the anal sacs were vestigial organs and, second, whether Rowdy would mind having them emptied.

  I shot a protective hand toward Rowdy. “Yes! He certainly would mind. And they don’t need emptying. They’re not full.”

  “Do they ever explode?” Ivan asked eagerly.

  “Not that I’ve noticed.” I sounded casual, as if such an event might entirely fail to blow my superb sangfroid.

  “I read that in a book,” Ivan explained. “It said that sometimes if dogs are, like, in stressful situations, they’ll explode. All of a sudden, they’ll just empty their anal sacs.”

  “I guess that sounded pretty interesting,” I murmured.

  “It did.” His reedy little-boy voice was serious, but those eyes gave him away. “I wondered if it made a noise.”

  “What it makes is a mess,” I said firmly. “And it doesn’t smell very good, either. But if you’re worried about having it happen while you’re working on his tail, don’t, because it isn’t going to. His anal sacs aren’t full, and that’s not how he reacts to stress. Besides, he likes being groomed, and he likes being the center of attention. He’s having a good time.” Then, either because I’m slow to catch on or because Ivan looked like a little kid and, damn it, was one, I put on a high-pitched talking-to-dopes voice and inquired, “Do you know what kind of a dog Rowdy is?”

  “Kotzebue,” Ivan said, “but not pure Kotzebue. Is that how you pronounce it?”

  Kotzebue? About one adult in five hundred thousand can recognize an Alaskan malamute, never mind tell a Kotzebue from a M’Loot. To malamute fanciers, the distinction between the two principal lines is sharp and clear, but practically no one else even knows that it exists.

  “Does your family breed malamutes?” I asked. If so, Ivan would have known how to pronounce Kotzebue, and, besides, Leah would certainly have told me, but I was so surprised that I didn’t think.

  By now, Ivan was ineffectually running a porcupine brush over the top layer of guard hair on Rowdy’s tail. “My father’s dead,” he said.

  “I’m sorry.” For Ivan. For asking.

  “He died a long time ago. In Cameroon.”

  I struggled to remember where Cameroon was. “Oh,” I said feebly.

  Ivan looked up and stared at me. “Men don’t live as long as women,” he informed me. “Most men don’t. On the average. It’s a matter of probabilities.”

  “I guess that’s true.”

  “It is,” he said decisively.

  I wondered whether to assure Ivan that his mother would live a long time. Leah had mentioned her, so I knew she was alive, but I was afraid that she might have some terminal illness I hadn’t heard about or that Ivan would inform me that one in every nine American women gets breast cancer or that he’d produce some other argument I’d be unable to rebut. I wished Rita were there to advise me. I was forced to follow my instincts. “Do you have a dog at home?” I asked.

  He switched to Rowdy’s left rear leg, someone else’s territory, and began to brush vigorously. “No,” he mumbled.

  “A cat?”

  “We don’t have anything.” He made home sound like a vast empty space.

  “Then how come you know what a Kotzebue is?” I asked a little too brightly.

  “Because I read it in a book. My mother got it for me. It’s called This Is the Alaskan Malamute. It’s a pretty good book.”

  “Yes, it is. It has good pictures.” The remark wasn’t as condescending as it probably sounds. The book does have good photos, including an extraordinary number of the legendary Floyd, Inuit’s Wooly Bully, my favorite of which isn’t one of the show-win shots but a snap of that gorgeous dog in the ring at Westminster in 1968. The handler isn’t even looking at the dog—he’s bending over to set him up for judging—but the great showman, the pretty boy, is glowing and grinning. That picture captures the independent show-off joy of the dog and of the whole breed. The photo also happens to highlight Rowdy’s almost uncanny resemblance to this extraordinary creature, but that’s incidental.

  So I said that I too liked the pictures, and Leah, who was leaning over to supervise the application of grooming spray to Rowdy’s left side, overheard and interjected, “Ivan’s a little beyond picture books. Aren’t you, Ivan? He just finished The Call of the Wild. And not the abridged version, either.”

  Critics complain about Jack London’s anthropomorphism or claim that he portrayed dogs not as they are, but as we wish they were. I disagree. I love Jack London. What’s more, I know the secret of his power. Jack London did write about dogs as they are: In their hearts, they are exactly as we wish them to be. No other writer has ever captured that identity with London’s passion.

  “My mother says that it’s an example of anthropomorphism,” Ivan said, “because Buck thinks and remembers and everything, so he isn’t really a dog. He’s more like a person.”

  “What do you think?” I asked.

  “I think he’s a dog,” Ivan said.

  “I do, too. And I always cry at the end.”

  “I didn’t,” said Ivan, stiff-jawed.

  “You did so, Ivan,” one of the girls told him. “I saw you.

  “Everybody has feelings.” Leah spoke in the sanctimonious tone of progressive education. “So everybody gets to cry. Everybody feels sad sometimes, so everybody gets to cry. It’s all right.”

  In lieu of responding to Leah, at least directly, Ivan trained those violet-blues on me and demanded, “Did you know that people have only twenty-three pairs of chromosomes? But dogs have thirty-nine.”

  “I did know that,” I said. “Impressive, huh?”

  “The chromosomes are in pairs, and so are the genes on the chromosomes, and if both the genes are just the same, in a pair, then that’s homozygous, and if they... if the genes are both recessive... if they’re homozygous recessive, then you see it! Like blue eyes, at least in people. And the way you remember that is easy, and that’s that it takes two to tango! And if one of the genes is dominant and the other’s recessive, then all you see is the dominant, like brown eyes, in people, but the gene for blue is still there! You just can’t see it. And the way you remember that is because nobody’s asked it to dance! It just has to sit there, because—”

  “Because it takes two to tango,” I said. “I’ve never thought of it that way before.”

  “Neither did Matthew,” Ivan said, shaking his head. “Until I explained it to him,” he added.

  “Ivan, you aren’t getting to the undercoat.” I handed him a wire slicker. “What you need to do is sort of part the hair, like this. You’re right-handed, so you hold back a section with your left hand, and then you just brush out a little bit at a time. Okay? Only be careful not to scratch Rowdy’s skin or your hand with the wire bristles. Good! That’s it!”

  “This isn’t very fascinating,” Ivan said morosely. “Well, it doesn’t have to be done all that often,” I told him. “And maybe you’d like it better if you’d got one of Rowdy’s sides or something. Maybe you can get someone to swap with you.”

  “No one’s going to trade something good. Mee Lee got the head.” He glared at her. “She sucks up to everyone.”

  “Mee Lee is doing a very good job, and she’s tall enough to reach. But you’re right. She is lucky. Almost anyone would rather get the head than—”

  “Than a stupid dog bottom.” Ivan transferred the glare from Mee Lee to me. “Anyone,” he said, “would really rather get the whole dog.”

  A kid worth a full-page spread. I’m afraid you
’ll have to imagine the photo, but otherwise?

  Ivy League Kennels

  (“Bred To Think/Born To Talk”)

  Proudly Introduces

  IVAN FLYNN-ISAACSON

  Eyes Clear Violet-Blue Prelim. IQ (9 years) Staggering

  “The Terrible” is pictured taking Best Junior Mind at the Avon Hill Summer Specialty under respected judge Holly Winter. Already pointed, Ivan exhibits quality, type, soundness, and creativity—he has it all! And he’s a personality-plus kid, too! Watch for him! He’s a winner!

  Exclusively Handled By:

  HarvardUniversity Kennels

  Cambridge, Massachusetts 02138

  “Registered Professors’ Brats Since 1636”

  18

  “So for once,” Rita conceded, “a dog is probably not a bad idea.”

  Every child deserves a dog, but a child worth a full-page ad? A boy who’s lost his father? And who’s getting himself in trouble instead of getting himself in the ribbons for junior handling? I’d arrived home from the grooming demo at Avon Hill convinced that Ivan was a kid worth not just any dog, either, but worth a stellar representative of the breed of breeds, the dog of dogs, dog to the nth, the incomparable Alaskan malamute. I pay no higher compliment. Was Ivan ready, though? And which sex? I was leaning toward a bitch small enough for Ivan to control. Also, I had a hunch that it might do Ivan some good to discover that there was one creature on earth smarter than he was, and for raw IQ, the odds are in favor of the bitches. (Yes, in malamutes, too.) On the other hand, for a boy without a father, a male might be a better choice. So I’d asked Rita, who, for the first time since she’d got the damned hearing aids, had shown up at dinnertime with a collection of gourmet take-outs for us to share. By the time I’d finished telling her about Ivan, my kitchen table was littered with empty and half-empty plastic containers, and I was pouring boiling water onto freshly ground French roast Swiss-water-process decaf, which is what Cambridge psychotherapists drink except when they’re due to see really boring patients and want to be sure of staying awake. Mostly, though, therapists find their patients interesting and thus avoid what they consider to be the perils of caffeine. Writers love caffeine, of course. I, for example, regularly dose myself with the stuff. Tea is my usual drug of choice for the sustained-release effect needed to turn out free-lance articles and stories, but when my column is overdue, I switch to coffee, and when I’m up against a serious deadline, I hit my nervous system with a Puerto Rican wonder drug called Café Bustelo, and if you think that café is nothing more than the Spanish word for coffee, that’s only because you’ve never tried Bustelo, siempre fresco, puro y aromatico, the greatest writing tool since the invention of the stylus.