Ruffly Speaking

by Conant, Susan

  The no-force technique Leah was applying—binding —consists of using a short lead to clamp the dog to your left side in perfect heel position while you simultaneously pour on praise for the flawless heeling you’ve set the dog up to execute. Leah was making cheerful noises to hold Kimi’s attention, moving quickly enough to keep Kimi prancing happily along, murmuring heartfelt praise, and not giving Kimi a single opportunity to make a mistake. No force? No choice. I wished Bernie Brown were there to watch. As top handlers go, Bernie holds an unusually high opinion of Alaskan malamutes as competitive obedience dogs. His published view on the matter is that they make nice pets. I wonder, though, whether he understands that binding could have been designed for the breed. After all, Bernie Brown’s approach is the only one to capitalize on the universal conviction of Alaskan malamutes that since they’re smarter than everyone else, they’re absolutely always right.

  Hubris.

  Well, yes. Hubris is one of the ten most popular dog names in Cambridge. But what I had in mind was the foundation bitch, so to speak: the arrogance of mortals who imagine themselves equal to the gods, the fatal flaw that stood between Oedipus and his Elysian OTCH. That was back in the old days, of course, before Bernie Brown. I’m serious. Take Oedipus. With Bernie Brown handling, the guy wouldn’t even have seen his mother, never mind had the chance to you-know-what. And where would that have left Freud? In the absence of the name, in the absence of the event itself, would the concept have entirely eluded Freud? Does insight require the correct proper noun, which itself requires individuals to remain on their allotted continents in their assigned centuries instead of zipping around through space and time like Ralph and Doris on their pitiful whine-ridden excuse for what started as a happy family excursion, but turned into a galactic nightmare when Aaron and Hazel threw a con-joint celestial temper tantrum and, in an unprecedented moment of unanimity, refused to settle for the likes of Violet?

  But what about Violet herself?Ralph’s fault for getting lost? Doris’s fault for misreading the map? Violet doesn’t know, though. All that terror, all that suffering, and no explanation. No-fault divorce, no-fault car insurance, fine, but no-fault alien abduction? The hand of fate?

  Violet might be persuaded to buy that explanation, but only because the sole companion animal she’s had in thirty-six years is the gerbil that died. Violet does not own a dog. She does not train dogs. She knows nothing of the Brownian revolution. I am not Violet. I use Bernie Brown’s methods as they suit me and my dogs, and as I understand it, that’s exactly how he intends them to be used. I am no recent convert, I am not Leah, but I am convinced that the most effective way to train is to present no choice except the correct one, and, overall, I agree that the hand of fate is the hand of the handler, the voice of fate the handler’s, the mistakes, the blame, the fault.

  Leah has switched exercises. She’s practicing what’s called the come fore, the part of the recall that consists of having the dog position herself straight in front of the handler. With Kimi still on the twenty-one-inch lead, Leah moves forward and then calls “Kimi, come!” Simultaneously, Leah backs up, takes a seat in an invisible chair, and brings Kimi into the chute formed by her bent knees. Guaranteed perfection? Not quite. Kimi is not directly in front of Leah, but twists toward Leah’s right side, all too ready to go around to heel position. Her forepaws are not even. The left rests on the grass a good inch ahead of the right. An error! Whose fault? Leah’s. Notice her feet, the right toe an inch in front of the left. Peer into Leah’s right hand. Fastidious adolescent, she dislikes the taste of Redi-Liver and shies from the dead-center, mouth-to-jaw spit. Kimi’s error. Leah’s fault.

  Morris picked the greens, Morris made the salad, Morris ate it. How could he have been so stupid? Morris’s fatal error. If the grill had exploded? In a way, Matthew was right. His mother knew she shouldn’t smoke. Stephanie’s fault. And Ruffly was charged with hearing for her. If he had failed to detect the gas? Then Ruffly’s fault, too. But the grill hadn’t exploded. Kimi had sat crooked, too.

  Only a few minutes earlier, bound to Leah’s side, Kimi had been deliberately set up to take credit for perfect heeling, and she had heeled perfectly, too. She’d had no choice. Any experienced dog trainer would have realized, however, that at this stage of training, most of the credit belonged not to the dog but to the handler. Old-fashioned trainers would have disapproved. They’d have told Leah to keep Kimi on a loose lead and to treat every error as the opportunity to get in a collar-jerk correction. In watching, they wouldn’t really have understood what they were seeing. But an up-to-date trainer? Whether Leah succeeded or failed, any, absolutely any, contemporary trainer should have taken one look and said, “Oh, binding. Bernie Brown.”

  And a professional dog writer, trainer and handler of numerous consistently high-scoring golden retrievers, columnist for Dog’s Life, member of the board of the Cambridge Dog Training Club, occasional contributor to Off-Lead, and every-word-of-every-issue front-to-finish reader of Front and Finish! An individual who continued to harbor the intense, if delusional, hope of putting a C.D.X. on an Alaskan malamute? A person who had spent the previous three weeks enduring her cousin’s increasingly irksome proselytizing for the Bernie Brown method? Well, I’d have expected better. I could hardly believe how slow I’d been. I of all people should have spotted it: binding. The no-force method of murder.

  29

  By the time Steve arrived, I’d fed the dogs, taken a shower, and put on a black L.L. Bean tank-top dress with a wide jersey belt. Black may not seem like a festive choice for the Fourth of July, and it sure shows dog hair, but the weather was hot, the dress was cool, and, to my way of thinking, L.L. Bean’s closest approximation to the rich and varied shades of Rowdy’s coat was a perfectly patriotic choice. If I’d been Betsy Ross, the American flag would display a head study of an Alaskan malamute against a field of stars and stripes, and our national colors would be red, white, blue, and dark wolf gray.

  Steve turned up in a new white polo shirt and tan pants devoid of any particular canine or nationalist associations. Before he’d even entered the kitchen, Rita came pattering down the back stairs carrying a bottle of wine and wearing a red linen dress and red heels so high that it made my feet hurt just to look at them.

  “Tah dah!” she announced. “Am I all right? Have I gone too far?

  “No,” I said, “not at all. You look wonderful.”

  “Fetching,” said Steve, D.V.M. and dog trainer, but not usually punster, at least not intentionally.

  “Fetching?” Rita was delighted. “What higher compliment?”

  Steve still didn’t get it. While Rita explained, I called out, “Leah! Leah, you’re due at the Bensons’ at seven-thirty at the latest. Can you hear me?”

  She was in the bathroom, but the shower wasn’t yet running.

  “Yes,” she called out.

  “Don’t spend an hour on your hair, okay? And don’t bring Kimi. Do you understand? There’ll be food, and she’ll steal everything, and there’s a hearing dog in the house. I do not want you showing up with her. Is that clear?”

  “Okay!” The shower started.

  To console Rowdy and Kimi, who were prancing around depositing dog hair on our clothes and begging to go along, I doled out two lams biscuits. Then I took two bottles of wine from the refrigerator, handed them to Steve, and picked up the present I’d wrapped for Ruffly, a squeaker-free polyester fleece toy in the form of a person —great toy, by the way, but if your dog chews, watch out for the ones with squeakers, and if you don’t know why, ask your vet, unless, of course, your vet happens to be out of town enjoying a luxury vacation paid for by all those other dog owners who also didn’t know why to watch out for squeaker toys until their dogs ended up in surgery and their vets ended up in Barbados. Got it?

  Steve’s van was parked in my driveway, and although Highland Street was only a few blocks away, I wanted to take it to Stephanie’s. I hate hot weather. But Steve argued that it was a beautiful e
vening, and Rita agreed with him. Popping firecrackers volleyed like gun. shots, and the heat, humidity, and air pollution had turned the evening sky a glowing orange-red that reminded me of an oil refinery fire I’d once witnessed on the outskirts of Philadelphia. Instead of whining about the heat and bragging about my privileged childhood on the cold Atlantic coast, I said that it certainly smelled and sounded like the Fourth of July, and it did, too, but I regretted my words as soon as I’d spoken. Mentioning the charcoal briquettes, lighter fluid, and charred chicken skin was fine, but the rat-a-tat-tat of the cherry bombs must have drilled through Rita’s aids and into her ears like a sadistic dentist drilling into the unanesthetized nerve of an abscessed molar.

  To avoid embarrassing Rita, I withheld an apology and changed the subject. I’d called Steve earlier to outline the ultrasound explanation of Ruffly’s episodes. As we walked down Appleton Street, I began to fill in the details. Rita joined me. My ideas about the no-force method, though, I kept entirely to myself. Why, I’m not sure, except that I’d started to wonder whether I might be suffering from a psychiatric ailment that I’d previously dismissed as one of Rita’s therapist jokes: reverse paranoia, the delusion that you’re following someone. Sorry, but that’s a direct quote.

  As we crossed Huron Avenue, Steve said, “But you didn’t find the source of the ultrasound.”

  “I checked outside and around the kitchen,” I said, “but I couldn’t go poking in Stephanie’s closets, and, of course, I didn’t know exactly what I was looking for. If it’s one of the zappers meant for kennels, it would be a fairly big black box, I think. Or it could be a small one that Morris bought and tucked away somewhere.”

  Steve and I stride along at about the same big-dog pace. We kept glancing at Rita to make sure that we weren’t going too fast for her. When she spoke, she sounded a little out of breath. “Holly, was Morris the kind of person who might have used one of those on his dogs?” She cleared her throat. “As we both have reason to know, and maybe the less said the better, not everyone feels comfortable...”

  “Doug says no, but I’m not so sure. If the neighbors complained, Morris might have gotten all apologetic and ordered a Yap Zapper or something from one of the catalogs, and then never used it. He probably ordered chew toys and dog beds and stuff anyway, so it’s possible that, while he was at it, he ordered some kind of ultrasound gadget, too. But Morris used professional handlers. Groomers. If he’d really decided that the dogs needed training, he’d probably have hired a trainer, although it’s also possible that he would’ve been afraid that a trainer would be too hard on them.” I avoided Rita’s eyes. “I really don’t know.” What I knew for sure was that Morris Lamb would never deliberately have poisoned himself. Also, he couldn’t have tampered with the valve of the gas grill; he died in early May, long before Stephanie’s near accident.

  “Could be a neighbor,” Steve suggested. “That ad’s in the catalogs. ‘The ultimate solution to your neighbor’s barking dog.’ ”

  “There is this woman who lives next door,” I said. “Alice Savery.”

  “Savery’s sister,” Rita said.

  “Steve, you and I looked at her house. The really big run-down one next to Stephanie’s. But the thing is, Alice Savery’s very antidog, so she’s not exactly likely to be on R.C. Steele’s mailing list. And, besides, what really gets to her is dogs in her yard, digging or leaving urine spots on the lawn, that kind of thing. If she uses any kind of dog repellant, it’s probably... what’s it called? That stuff that you sprinkle around.”

  Steve supplied the brand name: “Get Off My Garden.”

  “Yes. And that’s in R.C. Steele, but it’s in the gardening catalogs, too, which is probably what Miss Savery gets, and they also carry, oh, netting to keep birds off your fruit trees and maybe electric fences. But wait a minute. There is something to get rid of gophers, I think. I saw it in a catalog at my father’s.” Buck is no gardener. He stays on the mailing lists because every few years, he orders a couple of apple trees to replace the ones killed by deer. “I’m not sure, but I think maybe it uses sound. Would Miss Savery... Steve, are there even any gophers in Cambridge?”

  “Not in my practice.”

  “Seriously.”

  “No. The only animal around here that’s going to do any real damage to lawns is a skunk. They dig. But that’s not what’s going on. Those pest repellers run constantly, or they’re on a fixed schedule. Ruffly’s only reacting every once in a while. Whatever the device is, it’s malfunctioning and going off by itself every now and then, or something’s triggering it. Barking. Someone pressing a button. Something.”

  “I didn’t think of that.” I shook my head. “But speaking of Miss Savery, I have wondered whether she might’ve noticed something. She must spend half her life outside in the yard, plus she’s paranoid about kids touching her precious fence or running through her yard.”

  “Phobic,” Rita said.

  “Phobic. So if someone’s been sneaking around Stephanie’s using a Yap Zapper or something, it’s not likely to have escaped Miss Savery.”

  “Someone like that’s going to be the first person to call the cops,” Steve said. “She isn’t going to keep it to herself.”

  “Not necessarily,” said Rita, trotting along breathlessly.

  “Miss Savery calls them all the time,” I said as we rounded the corner and started up Highland. “Kevin told roe about her. She calls them about everything. So, damn, if she has called about someone hanging around Stephanie’s house, they wouldn’t’ve paid any attention, because she’s cried wolf a million times. I should’ve asked Kevin to find out if she’d made any recent calls about anyone lurking around. Those nine-one-one calls are recorded. He ought to be able to look it up.” As I talked, I found myself scanning the lush green yards. No matter how hard I stared, ultrasound wouldn’t become visible, and a neighbor with a powerful, wide-range anti-bark machine wasn’t apt to set it on a pedestal like a sundial or a birdbath. I looked, anyway.

  “But even if she has called, what’s that going to mean?” Rita gripped the bottle of wine. “It’s going to mean that she called because she saw, (a) something that was there or (b) something she imagined was there, so—”

  “Good point,” Steve said.

  “Damn!” I said softly.

  “What?” Rita asked.

  “Damn!”

  “I heard you, I just—”

  I caught Rita’s eye, dipped my head, and stared pointedly. “That," I said, “is Alice Savery, the grayhaired woman in the khaki dress, and she’s coming straight down her front walk. Damn it, it never occurred to me, but it would be just like Stephanie to feel sorry for her and invite her tonight. She is the nastiest woman. If you didn’t go to Harvard, she treats you like a dog that just messed on her rug, and she doesn’t even like—”

  “Class,” Rita muttered, “the issue of the decade. She Probably has a social mode that she switches into for occasions like this. Little anecdotes about her brother, that kind of thing.”

  “Right,” I said sourly. “She’ll keep us in stitches. If we have to spend an entire evening—”

  “We don’t,” Steve said. “She’s carrying a trowel and a bucket. She’s weeding.”

  After marching down her front walk and peering up and down Highland Street without giving me even a nod of acknowledgment, Alice Savery headed back into her yard and then fell to her knees before a bed of what I thought were King Arthur delphiniums, the tall purple ones with little bits of white in the middle of the blossoms, white bees. Relieved as I was to be spared Alice Savery’s condescension, something in the bend of her wiry spine and the sharp angle of her elbow aroused my sympathy. Cultivating the soil around her delphiniums, Alice Savery couldn’t fail to see the arrival of guests next door. Alone with her flowers, she’d hear the greetings and the small talk, and, later, in her gracious, shabby house, the windows open to let in the night air, she’d have to smell the food cooking and listen to the ring of our wine bottles
on the rims of glasses, the clatter of plates and silverware, the sounds of the party amplified by her own exclusion.

  30

  If I’d been allowed to choose my own spot on the deck, I’d have plunked myself down between Steve Delaney and the platter of jumbo shrimp. Stephanie, alas, was the kind of organized hostess who graciously prevents a guest from committing such transgressions as nuzzling up to her lover while stuffing herself with the premium appetizer and thereby weaseling out of the obligation to make polite conversation with people who have nothing to say. As it was, I found myself marooned on the opposite side of the deck from Steve and the shrimp, and right next to Matthew Benson and the equally voluble and charming gas grill. A low table in front of me held a round wooden cheese board with a dozen water biscuits and a fat rectangular chunk of what looked like the same cheddar I use to train the dogs.

  Desperate for a topic, I asked Matthew how things were going at the Avon Hill Summer Program.

  “Fine,” he replied.

  I waited for him to expand. He didn’t. I reminded myself that he was a perfectly nice boy who probably froze up in the presence of adults. I should sympathize with him. His mother had probably raised him the way she did everything else: politely and efficiently. He’d been accepted at Stanford, his first choice, but Stephanie had insisted that he stay on the east coast. Then, when he’d turned down Stanford for Harvard, Stephanie had promptly accepted the job in Cambridge and ended up with exactly what she wanted: a son at Harvard, a prestigious parish, a house just off Brattle Street. I wondered precisely when she’d been offered the job at St. Margaret’s and whether she’d kept her plans to herself until her son committed himself to Harvard. I tried to think out a rough schedule. Morris Lamb died on the night of May 8 or in the early hours of May 9. Stephanie had moved to Cambridge before then; she’d told me about visiting Morris. She’d been the rector of St. Margaret’s when Morris died; she’d conducted his funeral service. When did college acceptances go out? The middle of April, I thought. By then, Stephanie must at least have applied to St. Margaret’s. She probably knew that the job was hers. When Matthew turned Stanford down, he hadn’t known that his mother would be in Cambridge; I was willing to bet that she had. The house on Highland, Morris’s house? Here she was, her dark hair imperially swept back, the silver-and-turquoise Navajo necklace spread like a breastplate across the bodice of another robelike dress, white linen, spotless. Morris Lamb’s death? Assistance-dog organizations don’t hand over meticulously and expensively educated dogs to untrained applicants. Anyone with a hearing dog has been through an intensive crash course on all aspects of responsible ownership. Stephanie knew not to let her dog eat houseplants, shrubs, or flowers. Any book on basic dog care would have given her a list of common poisonous plants: mountain laurel, azalea, fox-glove, dozens of others that Stephanie could have bought at a local nursery. If she’d mixed the leaves of any one of those plants'with real mesclun greens from our fancy local greengrocer and shown up at Morris’s with a surprise gift? Morris would never have mistrusted her. Alternatively, she could have planted something directly in the raised bed…