Animal Appetite

by Susan Conant

  MUSIC HAUL

  HARMONIOUS PIANO TRANSPORT

  KEYED TO YOUR RANGE

  When I’d phoned Claudia to ask whether someone else in the family might have a picture of Jack’s dog, Skip, Claudia hadn’t mentioned the son, Gareth (whose name had appeared in his father’s obituary), but had conceded that her daughter, Bronwyn, might have a photo. She’d given me Bronwyn’s phone number. When I called to explain my quest, Bronwyn sounded gruff—her voice was hoarse—but she agreed to tell me about the dog and promised me a photo of him. Actually, I asked for a picture of Skip. She sounded offended. “You’ve got it wrong,” she told me abruptly. “It was Chip, not Skip. Chipper. And he was, too.”

  Now, on Saturday morning, as I parked next to the black panel truck and opened the car door, loud barking emanated from behind a shiny black door set in the wall of a brick warehouse. Mounted next to the door was a glossy black sign with gold letters:

  MUSIC HAUL

  BRAT ANDREWS, PROP.

  I knocked. The dog fell silent. The door opened, and there stood before me the most extraordinarily muscular woman I have ever seen. It occurred to me that Music Haul might have no employees whatsoever; the proprietor looked capable of bench-pressing a concert grand all on her own. She wore her straight black hair in a crew cut and was dressed entirely in black: a Music Haul T-shirt, jeans, and running shoes. Her eyes were a startling shade of intense violet-blue. So were the bold tattoos on her immense biceps. The tattoo on her left upper arm depicted a leaping Rottweiler dog. On the right was a close-up portrait of the dog’s face. The model for both, a handsome male, posed like a sphinx in a down-stay about a yard in back of her on the floor of a cluttered office.

  “Winter?” she demanded.

  I nodded.

  “Brat,” she stated flatly. She did not smile. Now I understood why her voice was hoarse: from struggling to lower its natural high pitch. “Come in.” She nodded to the dog. “Okay,” she told him softly. “Good boy, Johann.” She didn’t bother to say that the dog wouldn’t hurt me.

  The unfriendliness of the reception compelled me to show off. I started with the dog’s name, Johann. I’d have bet a thousand dollars on what it stood for. I’d have won. “J. S. Bark,” I said.

  Brat’s nod was almost imperceptible.

  “I have dogs, too.” I smiled.

  She didn’t. She didn’t offer me a seat, either. Johann came up and sniffed the pockets of my jeans. “Good boy,” I told him. Ordinarily, I’d have asked permission to give him a treat, but I thought his owner wouldn’t like it. “When you taught him to down,” I informed Brat, “you taught a moving down. You didn’t teach him to stop or sit first.” I knew I was right. If you teach a dog to lie down by having him stop or sit and then lower himself, you don’t get that haunches-up sphinx look. Rather, you get a slow drop into what the dog thinks is a boring, static position. Although she’d addressed Johann in English, I blandly asked, “Schutzhund?” It’s a German system of dog training that consists of obedience, tracking, and protection work. It used to have a bad rep in the United States among AKC obedience people like me. We thought it was authoritarian. In truth, we were bigoted: What we really thought was that it was fascist dog training. Then we discovered—paws across the water—that while we, the good guys, had been hurting our dogs with choke chains and pinch collars, a Schutzhund trainer named Gottfried Dildei had been using fun and food. Schutzhund means “protection dog,” and the “bite work,” as it’s called, training in aggression, still puts me off, but I’ve had to wonder who’d really been the fascist trainers?

  A lot of people know about Schutzhund. Brat still wasn’t impressed. I’d begun to make an impact, though. She backed up, took a seat in a battered wooden chair in front of a littered rolltop desk, and silently pointed a finger at an old green-upholstered armchair about three yards from the desk. I lowered myself obediently into the chair. Johann nuzzled my hands. I stroked his head.

  “Beautiful dog,” I said. Then I really, really showed off. “Sally Brand did a good job.” I’d recognized Sally Brand’s work the second I’d seen those tattoos on Brat’s arms. Sally does genuine portraits. She has a great eye for a likeness. A great needle, too.

  Brat finally cracked. For the first time, she looked like the little girl in the old photograph, the child who’d craned her neck to return her father’s grin.

  “I wrote an article about Sally Brand once,” I explained. “The one I’m doing about your father is mostly about his dog.”

  “Daddy wouldn’t have minded that,” Brat said. “Chip went everywhere with Daddy. Chip adored him. They adored each other.” Her own Johann was at her side now. His worshipful eyes studied her face. Her hand rested on his powerful neck.

  “I’m sorry I got Chip’s name wrong.”

  “That was Claudia. She probably forgot it. She hated him. My parents fought about Chip all the time. Him and everything else. Or as Claudia always said, ‘We don’t have fights! We discuss things.’” The abrupt shift from gruff silence to intimate family matters made me feel slightly disoriented. Before I could ask an innocuous question about Chip, Brat leaned forward and confided, “Money was the other thing. Daddy was very generous. He was the original soft touch. I remember one time, someone came to the door asking for a donation to something, Greenpeace, some clean-water group, something like that, and Daddy wrote a check for a hundred dollars. And Claudia sat Gareth and me down and said that if we couldn’t go back to school in the fall, it’d be all Daddy’s fault. Gareth started crying and screaming. He took Claudia’s side. He always did. It was a real scene.”

  “You both went to Avon Hill?” It’s one of the most prestigious private schools in Cambridge. My cousin Leah once worked at the Avon Hill Summer Program. She taught a course in conversational Latin. That about sums up Avon Hill. I hastened to tell Brat that I’d read her father’s obituary and that Avon Hill had been mentioned.

  “Yes. We both went there. I didn’t fit in too well. It wasn’t big on sports. But the music program was really good. That’s why my father wanted us there. It was just Claudia who was always threatening that we’d have to go to public school. Her other favorite theme was that the gas and electricity would be cut off, and we’d have to sit in the dark eating cold sandwiches.”

  “You lived in Cambridge?”

  “Yes. Not where Claudia does now, not on Francis Avenue. We had a house in North Cambridge, right off Mass. Ave. We lived on the first floor. A humble abode, but our own. Or the bank’s. But it was okay. The yard was fenced. Chip was one of those goldens that go crazy for tennis balls. We had an old hammock out there, and I used to lie in the hammock and throw his ball for him. He loved water. You’d be in the shower, and he’d be trying to jump in with you. Claudia went wild over that one. One time in the summer, there was a heat wave, and we didn’t have air-conditioning, and Daddy and I bought a wading pool. And when Chip ever discovered that! Hewas a really fun dog. High energy. He jumped on people. Daddy never trained him, and at the time, I didn’t know how.”

  “Brat, when did your father get Chip?”

  “Four years before he died.” Her face looked pained. Her voice shifted to its little-girl pitch. “Four years before Daddy died.”

  “Your mother told me that your father’s murder had been written up in a book.” When I’d spoken to Claudia about a photo and been given Brat’s number, I’d asked for the title of the book. Claudia had said she couldn’t remember. I told Brat so.

  “Bullshit. She has about a hundred copies of it. It’s called Mass. Mayhem.”

  “Do you happen to own it?”

  She shook her head. “I read it when it first came out. I threw it away. It was a piece of trash.”

  “Do you remember the author?”

  “Randall Carey.”

  “When was it published?”

  “Ten years ago. Give or take.”

  “Brat,” I asked tentatively, “did you know Shaun McGrath?”

  Her or
iginal immobility returned. Her eyes narrowed. Her jaw clenched.

  “I shouldn’t have asked,” I said.

  “No, it’s okay. He was a little shit. Everyone hated him. Even Claudia had the sense to hate him. Gareth really hated him. We used to go over to Daddy’s office. We’d fool around with the Xerox machine. We used the typewriters. Gareth would type his homework. Daddy would’ve let us use the computers, but Shaun didn’t want us near them. We weren’t babies! Gareth was sixteen when Daddy died. I was eleven. We wouldn’t have hurt them. Shaun was just being a bastard about it, as usual. Daddy was the only one who got taken in by Shaun. Daddy was a soft touch about everything. Everyone liked him. He liked everyone.”

  Brat turned toward her desk, raised a tattooed body-builder arm, extracted two photographs from one of the overstuffed pigeonholes, and handed the pictures to me. One was the studio portrait of the young Jack Andrews that Claudia had given me. “College graduation?” I asked.

  “Yeah. But it looks like Daddy. It’s how I remember him.”

  The other, also a professional photograph, was a head study of a golden retriever.

  “Brat, did your father show Chip?”

  She looked pleased. “No, but he was a good-looking dog, wasn’t he? Good bone. Nice head.”

  “Do you know where he came from?” I could tell at a glance that the dog wasn’t from our lines-my mother’s lines—but I was equally certain that he was from another show breeder’s. “Do you know his registered name?” Little details—the dog’s registered name, his breeder—would please the readers of Dog’s Life.

  “No idea.”

  “Would Claudia have his papers?”

  “Not a chance. If she’d come across Chip’s papers, she’d have thrown them out.”

  “Your mother told me that she found Chip a good home. I wonder if his papers might’ve gone with him.”

  To my amazement, Brat’s violet-blue eyes filled with tears. She reached out for Johann and let him lick her muscular hands. I waited. Eventually, she said, “I don’t know what Claudia told you, but let me tell you something. The night she found Daddy, the night he died, she didn’t even bring Chip home. You know who she sent him home with? Shaun McGrath! She sent Chip home with Shaun McGrath. After the morning of the day Daddy died, I never saw Chipper again.”

  CHAPTER 8

  Returning firom my visit to Brat Andrews, I took advantage of a second burst of Indian summer—am I allowed?—to tidy my yard, rake leaves, and work on my woodpile. If the stripped, skeletal branches of the trees and the blackened mounds of frost-killed impatiens hadn’t given away the late-November date, the day could have passed for a warm October 1. If you know Cambridge, you’ve probably noticed my house, which is the barn-red one at 256 Concord Avenue, almost on the corner of Appleton.

  What draws attention to my house is the little “spite building,” as it’s known, that occupies the actual corner of Concord and Appleton, and fences in one side of my yard. Although the spite building apparently memorializes the bitterness of some long-ago property dispute, the improbability of the long, narrow one-story structure adds charm and whimsy suitable to its recent reincarnation as a tiny toy shop. Vines grow thickly up the brick wall on my side of the spite building, and I keep my house and my wooden fences freshly painted. I clean up after the dogs every day, regularly fill in the holes left by Kimi’s bouts of excavation, routinely prune the lilacs and roses, and apply gypsum in a doomed effort to undo the damage caused by dog urine.

  This year, I added a park bench. It’s been a big hit with the dogs. Consequently, I have to hose it down all the time, and it’s already showing rust spots. The bird feeder was a disaster, at least from my point of view. Rowdy and Kimi saw it as a device to lure prey. Malamutes, I hereby testify, can catch songbirds on the wing. On the last day of the bird feeder’s residence in my yard, Kimi turned out to have caught what I think had once been a house sparrow. She’d swallowed it whole. Enough said. I gave the feeder to Mrs. Dennehy. Even without it, however, the yard is on its way to becoming a little urban Eden.

  A New Yorker by birth, Rita was seated on the perfectly clean park bench leafing through the Times and listening to me describe Brat Andrews. Rita wore a wool skirt, a good sweater, and leather pumps. I was on my hands and knees uprooting dead annuals. I had on torn jeans, a dirt-smeared sweatshirt, and a pair of the heavy leather boots with reinforced toes that I wear when I split wood.

  “In most cases,” Rita pronounced, “that particular defense against loss doesn’t take quite such an extreme form. It does happen, though. Now and then, you hear of a man whose wife dies, and all of a sudden, he appears in public wearing a piece of her clothing, with no apparent awareness of the incongruity. It’s a testimony to love, really. It’s the best way he can find to keep her alive.”

  “Well, besides trying to turn herself into a man,” I said, shaking the dirt off nasturtium roots, “what Brat’s doing is keeping herself Daddy’s little girl. When she refers to Jack, that’s what she calls him: Daddy. And she’s really got it in for her mother. She never calls her anything but Claudia, and she spits the name out, too. Daddy was perfect. Everything bad was Claudia’s fault.”

  “Polarized,” Rita commented. “Really, it all sounds like an effort to preserve the moment just before this traumatic loss. What a shame that she never had a chance to work herself free of this extreme idealization of the father! Every child deserves the opportunity for disenchantment. Speaking of idealized figures, how is Hannah coming along?”

  “Hannah! Well, damn, it’s—”

  “No, don’t tell me! She owned a darling little lapdog, and—”

  “No, she did not. That’s why I picked her to begin with. The New England colonists had dogs—some of them did—but not as real pets. They were superstitious about dogs. They thought they were creatures of Satan. God spelled backward.”

  “Is that true?”

  “Yes. I mean, I should’ve known there’d turn out to be something radically wrong with her! Rita, those so called Indians she killed? Six of them were children. Hannah Duston murdered six children. I am really disgusted.”

  Folding up the Times and rising, Rita said, “Well, if you set out to do research, Holly, you’ve got to be prepared to suspend judgment.”

  “Not,” I insisted, “if your previous research has consisted almost exclusively of documenting the perfection of dogs.”

  As Rita departed, my phone rang, and I dashed inside. I was hoping for a call from a professional portrait photographer named Violet Wish, who had long ago abandoned a successful career immortalizing children. She got fed up with mothers and switched to show dogs instead. With dogs, Violet claimed, she got very few complaints that there was something wrong with the mouth. When I’d dialed Violet’s number, I’d heard only the recording: “Violet Wish Studio! Dogs only! No, repeat, no children! Leave a message!” Before the beep sounded, a pack of little dogs sang out a cheerful chorus of yaps. Violet has papillons. I’d left word for her to call, but on a Saturday afternoon, she and the dogs were probably at a show. There was one in Fitchburg, a conformation show with no obedience. I hadn’t entered. Kimi wasn’t the judge’s type. Rowdy wasn’t, either, and in any case, he was still lame from his pad cut.

  In fact, the caller was a woman who wanted information about adopting a malamute. Alaskan Malamute Rescue is my unpaid job. I help to find adopters for homeless dogs. This woman’s wonderful-sounding golden retriever had died recently. After I explained that malamutes are big and powerful, shed plentifully, clown around in the obedience ring, steal food, and exhibit a pronounced wild streak, she asked whether I happened to have the number of Yankee Golden Retriever Rescue. I did. Gee, and I hadn’t even mentioned songbirds.

  For most of the afternoon, in between sprinting to answer the phone, I worked on the unsplit wood I’d hauled home from my father’s. My part of the house, the first floor, is an updated version of Cambridge student housing, but I renovated the second- and third-flo
or apartments when I bought the building, and Rita and the couple on the third floor expect the outside of the house to look decent. To my prosperous urban tenants, the pile of logs dumped at the far end of the driveway would suggest the imminent arrival of a rusted, doorless refrigerator and a flock of mite-infested geese. Splitting wood, like training dogs, is a meditative activity. On most of the logs, which were already cut to fireplace length, I used a big, sharp metal wedge that I drove in with a short-handled sledgehammer. The small pieces of birch just needed to be split with an ax. From time to time, I’d stop to stack the split wood under the flight of wooden stairs that leads up to the back door. I knew almost nothing about city rats. I hoped that, unlike chipmunks, they weren’t attracted to woodpiles.