Ruffly Speaking

by Conant, Susan

  But Ivan got in ahead of her. “American Canadian Bermudian Champion Inuit’s Wooly Bully.” He even managed to get it out with a straight face. I’ve mentioned the pretty boy before. International Ch. Inuit’s Wooly Bully, ROM—three countries. International; ROM, Register of Merit, sired five or more champions—was an Alaskan malamute bred and owned by Sheila Balch, not Ivan Flynn-Isaacson, who hadn’t even been born when Floyd died. Floyd. Call name. Pretty boy. Get it?

  Bernadette had finished slopping the boiling water into a Melitta cone precariously balanced on a hand-painted pottery pitcher. When she poured the coffee, it spilled on her hand and all around the dime-store mugs. She didn’t seem to mind. She gave me mine and said gently, “Ivan, our dog was named Hector.” To me she said, “Hector died when Ivan was only two.”

  “I remember him!” Ivan insisted belligerently. “Maybe you do,” Bernadette said. “And you’ve seen a lot of pictures of him.”

  I drank some coffee. It was surprisingly good. “What kind of dog was Hector?” I asked.

  “A mutt,” Bernadette said. “A little brown dog. He belonged to an old man we knew, and when the man had to go into a nursing home, we took Hector, and he was already seven by then, and he lived another ten years. To seventeen.”

  “Hector did tricks,” Ivan added.

  “He did,” Bernadette agreed, smiling. “That’s true. We didn’t teach him; he knew them when we got him. He was like a little circus dog. He could dance on his hind legs, and before he got old, he could walk on his front legs, too. He was a wonderful dog.”

  Hector sounded wonderful to me. He also sounded nothing whatsoever like an Alaskan malamute. I was feeling guilty and rotten. With Rowdy’s inadvertent help, Leah and I had roused Ivan’s longing for a malamute. We’d built up his hope of actually getting one. From a malamute’s point of view, there was nothing wrong with the home that Ivan and Bernadette could provide— fenced yard, someone at home a lot—but no matter how interested the child, the real dog owner is always the Parent, and I was far from sure that Bernadette shared Ivan’s eagerness. And if she’d raised a mere child to become as trouble-prone as Ivan, what could she do with a malamute? My other concern was Ivan’s size. A wiry, strong-looking kid, he was nonetheless too small to control a dog with the bulk and power of the average malamute, and it made no sense to get him a dog that was too big for him.

  “Ivan,” I said, “your mother and I need to have a private talk. Is there somewhere you can go?”

  “No,” he said.

  “Ivan! Of course there is,” Bernadette told him. “Why don’t you take your books to your room?”

  “Because—”

  “Please just do it!”

  When Ivan had reluctantly gathered up his dog books and departed, I bluntly told Bernadette that I was afraid that all of us had set Ivan up for disappointment. Most malamutes outweighed him, and, regardless of size, they were all born to pull. No child could take full responsibility for a dog, and children’s initial enthusiasm sometimes vanished rapidly.

  As I started to say more, Bernadette cut in. “You don’t understand. You’re worried that, with Ivan, this is some kind of passing fad. What you don’t know is that Ivan doesn’t have passing fads. Ask him to show you his collections.”

  “What does he collect?”

  “Wildflowers.Feathers. Bird feathers. He’s been doing that since he was three. They’re all in scrapbooks, all cataloged. And if you think he’s just looking at the pictures in the dog books—”

  “No—”

  “He’s been reading since he was four. He taught himself.”

  “He’s very gifted. That’s not the issue. One issue... Look, it seems to me that we both need a little time to think this over. I’m going to leave some things for you to read, about malamutes and about adopting adult dogs, okay? For you. Not just for Ivan. And you think about whether this is something you really want to do. And in the meantime, I’m going to ask around about the dogs we have available.” Then I lightened up and said that I hoped we could work something out. I meant it. We desperately need good homes. (Interested? Alaskan Malamute Protection League, P.O. Box 170, Cedar Crest, NM 87008.)

  Bernadette said that she hoped we could work something out, too. After that, she insisted that I have lunch. To my relief, she brought out a big loaf of Italian bread and four kinds of French cheese, and made a salad of the fancy baby greens she’d been washing. When Ivan rejoined us, I tactfully suggested a few breeds other than the malamute that might interest him.

  “But I’m not really interested in keeshonden,” he replied solemnly, with an emphasis on the correct plural. “What I’m interested in is Alaskan malamutes.”

  “Besides, Ivan doesn’t get interested," Bernadette said cheerfully. “What he gets is obsessed."

  25

  On the assumption that the godly, like the dogly, are early risers, I’d been tempted to phone the twice-blessed Stephanie Benson at seven that morning, but I’d waited until nine o’clock, an hour before I’d considered it civil to call Bernadette, especially on a Saturday that was also a holiday, the Fourth of July. When I reached Stephanie, however, she cheerfully assured me that she’d been up for hours and had, in fact, just returned from the Star Market, where she’d impulsively decided to celebrate Ruffly’s symbolic birthday—Independence Day? Did I remember?— and her renewed faith in him by having a little barbecue. Could I come?

  “Steve and I—” I started to say.

  “Oh, Steve’s invited, too. After all, it’s a celebration of Ruffly.” Stephanie sounded so elated that I had to accept.

  My reluctance? I’ll confess to a prejudice against dog parties, which aren’t very popular in New England, but are a growing trend in other parts of the country, especially Halloween costume parties to raise funds for humane societies and breed rescue groups. I don’t object to wearing a costume, but I’m so averse to making my dogs look ridiculous that the one time I simply had to attend one of these affairs, I compromised by going as Sergeant Preston and putting red harnesses on Rowdy and Kimi. Unfortunately, everyone saw through my ruse, and we didn’t get a prize. Also, the dogs hated what was supposed to be the main canine fun event, bobbing for hot dogs. They kept trying to filch splintery chicken bones that could have punctured their intestinal tracts, so I spent most of the so-called party sticking my hand down Rowdy’s and Kimi’s throats to fish for dangerous objects, and ended up eating what I tried to think of as dog-person chicken salad, cold drumsticks coated in fresh saliva.

  But this wasn’t October 31, costumes were out of the question, and Rowdy and Kimi weren’t invited. Besides, Stephanie had a good reason to celebrate. Her account of the gas grill incident agreed with Leah’s. Stephanie hadn’t smelled the gas because the wind was blowing it away from her. It made only a faint hiss that she might well have missed. It was also possible that her aids had cut out, she said; they were still giving her trouble. And Matthew was right: She shouldn’t smoke. Even so, if it hadn’t been for Ruffly? Well, no matter what else was going on with him, he’d demonstrated his complete reliability.

  As I’ve said, from a dog writer’s point of view, the rescue would have been a lot better if Ruffly had dramatically saved Stephanie’s life about two seconds before it was otherwise doomed to end. As it was, Stephanie might have smelled the gas in time to put away her lighter and turn the valve off. Also, even if she’d used her lighter, she’d might well have survived. In reality, a bad burn would have been terrible, but it seemed to me that, given the happy outcome, Ruffly would have done well to save his mistress from certain death, not just from uncertain injury. Furthermore, I would have preferred that Stephanie not smoke. For Dog’s Life, Ruffly should have been perfectly heroic; Stephanie, absolutely blameless. In toying with the idea of a few touch-ups—inevitable fatality, no cigarettes-—I found myself irked at both Ruffly and Stephanie for forcing me to choose between deceiving our readers and disappointing them.

  I could hardly expect Stephanie
to share my discontent; she was a priest, not a dog writer. Her faith in Ruffly fully restored, she was unequivocally delighted. Just before my visit to Ivan and Bernadette, I’d reached Steve, and he’d agreed that to refuse the invitation would have been mean and sour.

  “This is a barbecue?” he asked.

  “That’s what she said.”

  He got what I’d missed. “On the same gas grill?” He sounded more amused than worried.

  I wasn’t really worried, either. In fact, when I was driving home from Ivan and Bernadette’s, I heard a story on the radio about the holiday crowds already packing the Esplanade, and according to the weather report, the temperature was eighty-five and rising, so I was glad that Steve and I weren’t going to the Hatch Shell after all and equally glad that we had some kind of July Fourth event to attend instead, even a dog party at a rectory. Wild times.

  When I got home, I had to ease myself into the back hallway because the crate in which I’d incarcerated Willie yesterday took up most of the floor space. It was an ordinary collapsible wire cage designed for easy carrying and storage, but Rita hadn’t folded it correctly and must have had a tough time just getting it down the stairs. To stow it away properly, I had to set it up and then break it down and latch it, and the metal-on-metal noise of the wire sides hitting the floor pan must’ve alerted Rita to my return. One floor up, her door opened. I listened. Willie barked. Rita didn’t give even a low growl. The door closed.

  About twenty minutes later, after I’d stored the crate in the cellar and put the dogs out to doze in the shade of the yard, Rita rapped so sharply on my kitchen door that her rings must have bruised her knuckles. When I opened up, though, what she thrust at me wasn’t the battered hand of friendship, but the cheese-improved Plaque Attacker I’d freely and generously given to Willie a mere twenty-four hours earlier. Before leaving the toy in the crate, however, I certainly hadn’t encased it in a clear plastic bag.

  “Look!” I said happily. “He’s been chewing it already. See? It’s kind of rough around the pointy end.” Standing there in the hallway glaring at me, Rita looked like a long-suffering tenant driven at last to confront a slumlord with irrefutable evidence of the presence of rats. As if she could hardly bear to touch the plastic bag, she extended it far from her body, pinched between the thumb and first finger of her right hand. She honestly looked as if she were proffering a plastic-encased rodent carcass.

  “Oh, how horrible,” I said. “But I couldn’t use poison, could I? Not with the dogs around.”

  Rita finally opened her mouth, but she hadn’t softened any. “What?”

  “The trap.” I suppressed a grin. “It’s not very humane, I know, but, Rita, I got desperate. Dog toys? Those things really breed. Two today, ten tomorrow, a hundred thousand next week. So yesterday afternoon, as soon I heard that telltale scurrying, I ran and got out the trap. I’m terribly sorry about the dead Plaque Attacker, but—”

  “Oh, for Christ’s sake,” Rita snapped. “And stop smirking!”

  “Rita, is something wrong? No, don’t tell me. Rita, this is entirely my fault. A terrier? Bred to go after vermin. Willie went right after that nasty little dog toy, didn’t he? And got inadvertently caught in the trap.” I eyed Rita. She said nothing. “Brave little fellow,” I added. “Who would’ve thought he had it in him?”

  The Plaque Attacker still dangling from her hand, Rita said, “Your key is for emergencies only. Isn’t that our agreement?”

  “Rita, I’ve just—”

  “And cut the rodent crap.”

  I reached out and took the plastic bag. “Here, let me dispose of that for you. Phew! I’m afraid it’s already beginning to—”

  “Holly, when I am not home, you stay the hell out of my apartment, and, furthermore, if I want to hire someone to train my dog—”

  “It probably won’t be me. After all, I just might be effective.”

  “Do not shout at me,” Rita said with dignity.

  “Do not shout in my hallway. You’re not my only tenant, you know, and I will not have the Donovans disturbed by people squabbling in the hallway any more than I’ll have them driven out by a dog on the floor below that never shuts up. So come in!”

  The Donovans, who rent my third floor, have two Persian cats and no dog, but, in all other respects, they’re ideal tenants. They never complain about anything, even the washing-machine-rehydrated dog treats that kept clogging up the coin-op dryer in the basement, but it honestly wasn’t fair to inflict Willie’s barking on them. Lawrence, the husband, is an ordinary-looking, slightly plump Harvard M.B.A. with skin a few shades lighter than his wife’s cinnamon, and he’s less colorful than Ceci

  in most other respects, too. He dresses drably and is quite self-effacing, but Ceci wears dress-for-success clothes and has the air of authority that originally led me to believe that in renting to the Donovans, I’d scored a major dog-world coup. Much to my original disappointment, though, Ceci turned out not to be a real judge; all she does is sit on some circuit court of appeals. But, as I’ve said, they’re excellent tenants, anyway, and I didn’t want Willie driving them away.

  Once Rita had deigned to cross my threshold and I’d closed the door, we lowered our voices, but increased the intensity of the dispute. Rita hit me with two of the dirtiest epithets in the verbal cesspool that passes as the psychotherapeutic lexicon—intrusive and passive-aggressive—and I accused her of using her hearing loss to justify her selfish disregard for other people’s needs.

  That got to her. “Selfish! I don’t believe it! Holly, have you ever wondered why I am wearing these hearing aids? Is this really something I’m doing exclusively for me? Well, you know what? It damned well is not, because the fact is, I don’t really enjoy hearing. And you know why? Because the world is a screaming mess! I’m used to a nice, quiet world, and that’s how I like it, and the main so-called benefit I get from these things is that everything is clattering and banging all the time, and I hate it! Turn on the faucet, and instead of a nice, peaceful nothing, I get snap, crackle, and pop, like breakfast cereal, for God’s sake, and—”

  “Rita, why you are wearing the aids, if I might remind you, is so that you don’t keep going to the wrong funeral. Remember Morris Lamb?”

  Strangely enough, Rita and I had drifted toward our usual seats at my kitchen table, but instead of actually sitting down, we’d stationed ourselves behind the chairs almost as if we intended to use them as shields or as weapons against each other.

  “Well, let me remind you, Miss Know-It-All,” Rita said, tightening her grip on the chair, “that there happen to be a hell of a lot of people who don’t hear a damned thing, for all practical purposes, and who manage just fine, thank you, by signing instead of—”

  “Absolutely right,” I interrupted. “But you aren’t one of them, and why you aren’t one of them is that you don’t know a thing about deaf culture, and you’re probably not going to learn anything about it, either, because, for a start, not only do you not sign, but you aren’t actually deaf, either. All you are is—”

  “Don’t say it! Hard of hearing. Politically correct stance: Being deaf is not an illness, so it’s not something that needs to be cured. Hearing loss is no loss at all.” Rita spat out the words. “But just having a hard time hearing? Walking around with these hideous fake-flesh radios jammed in my ears so nobody has to bother to speak up? Well, that’s a whole other matter.”

  “Poor little Rita,” I said brusquely, “caught between two worlds, rejected by the truly deaf—”

  “Oh, shut up! You simply do not understand—”

  “What I understand perfectly is that my second-floor tenant has carefully trained her dog to become a nuisance barker, and I, for God’s sake, am a dog writer, but that much atmosphere I really don’t need.”

  “Fine,” Rita said. “Fair enough. But how about coming to me directly and—”

  “Because I have already done it! And meanwhile Willie’s gotten steadily worse, and you haven’t made th
e slightest move to do a thing about it, that’s why, and yesterday, I finally ran out of patience—”

  “And took it upon yourself, knowing full well how I feel about people intruding in my private space and also knowing full well exactly how I feel about imprisoning dogs in cages—”

  “Damn it, Rita, I did not imprison Willie. All I did was crate him temporarily with not just one but two very attractive chew toys so that he’d learn a socially acceptable way to entertain himself when you’re not home.” I broke off. “Speaking of which, since you disapprove so strongly of my vicious methods, and since you’re so busy returning my instruments of torture, where’s the rawhide?”

  Rita shifted her feet and pursed her lips, but she said nothing.

  “You tried to get it away from him, didn’t you?” I said vindictively. “But Willie wouldn’t give it up, would he?” Although I knew I was right, gloating was entirely unnecessary and unsporting, and I am thoroughly ashamed of it. But I was right. If Willie had rejected the rawhide or if she’d simply forgotten it, she wouldn’t have been half so furious at me.

  Instead of yelling, Rita took a deep breath, held it, and exhaled slowly. I had the impression that she wasn’t merely respirating, but was performing some kind of mind-body or, worse yet, mindbody—one word—exercise she’d learned in the eight-session stress-reduction workshop she’d taken the previous winter. Eight sessions. Sound familiar? Basic beginners’ dog training. Eight sessions. World’s most effective stress reduction. And Rita’s silly, pointless breathe-your-way-to-inner-peace beginners’ human soul training had even met on Thursday nights. But not at the armory. Not where my friends and I are training our dogs. Those charlatan gurus are smart enough to shield their clients from a clear view of the genuine secret of cosmic harmony.

  “Rita, look. I probably shouldn’t have used my key,” I conceded, “but what choice did I have? I have tried to talk to you about the barking, and you have not done a damn thing about it, and the reason is, I think, because you don’t get how big the problem is. Look. Willie is suffering from bored dog syndrome. And when you’re home, he isn’t bored, so he doesn’t do it, so you don’t hear how bad it is. But you do know that the Donovans aren’t complainers, and it isn’t too hard to guess that if Willie keeps it up, what they’re going to do is just nicely and politely find another apartment. And what am I sup-posed to do? And what about Kevin? And Mrs. Dennehy? And the other—”