The Dog Walker

by Joshua Stephens

  Some will argue this is a matter of preference or style, and I would have to respectfully disagree. Even in the case of two dogs that walk at differing paces, or who tend to wind each other up and thus need to be separated a bit, your free hand can grasp one lead farther down, make a loop around that fist with a single rotation, and allow you to utilize both hands in the management of the dogs, with the same effect of leashing dogs to separate arms. Should some contingency arise (as is inevitable), that hand can be freed up by simply releasing the lead already anchored to the other hand, and everyone is still secure.

  “Moses had a high prey drive,” Cody lamented, over the lip of a coffee mug. For the layperson, such a term may require some unpacking. A veterinarian or animal behaviorist would likely give some more sophisticated explanation, but the most important bit for a dog walker is: indoors, only a squirrel is a squirrel; outdoors, everything is a squirrel. It’s not like this was news to Cody. She’d been in the game a few years. “Dogs chase squirrels. Moses wanted to chase squirrels.” Our waitress refilled our coffee and took our orders.

  One stretch of their typical walk ran along a picket fence that turned at the adjacent property’s line. The divide was in the middle of the block; the picket fence cornered and continued back along the property line between the grassy edge of one plot and an apartment building. Between the picket fence and the wrought-iron fence around the apartment building, there was a gap of about a foot and a half. “Darby was, of course, lagging behind me. I think I had just checked the time on my BlackBerry, and was looking back at him as I put it back in my pocket.” Hungover hipsters had taken up at the table next to ours, and were browsing menus. They’d eyed us on their way in, but had otherwise ignored us.

  It’d be easy to read some fault into Cody’s admitted distraction, but the truth is that such multitasking is part of the job. Take a dog home too early, and the time-stamped text message a client receives from their home security system can leave you with a lot of pointless explaining. And anyway, there are certain unavoidable calamities that necessarily come with tethering oneself to an impulsive breed of mammal endowed with sensory capacities well out of proportion with its intelligence. Sometimes, you simply aren’t equipped to preempt. Blown knees, fractured heels, and occasional road rash are inevitable, and put other potential downsides into perspective. You learn to live with the lesser defeats. “If it goes squish, be happy it’s not a chicken bone,” one coworker was fond of saying with regard to dogs prone to scavenging. “If it goes crunch, be happy it’s not a condom.”

  And it’s largely down to this that Cody didn’t stand a chance on this particular day. Moses darted abruptly to the right, lunging into the gap between the two properties, with enough force to pin her to the picket fence. Everything around her stopped. Her senses jolted into self-preservation. The force of Moses pulling was quartering her on the pickets. “All I could think was What the everloving fuck is he doing?” Bracing her back against the fence, she leveraged her full weight to pull him back out onto the sidewalk, wagering some harm to the dog over further injury to herself. Her efforts broke the momentum enough to regain her footing and drag the dog back out into view. There was a momentary relief in having forced the scenario back into the general vicinity of standard operating procedure.

  It took a few seconds for her to fully take in what she was looking at. “And then it hit me. Like, straight up took the air from my lungs. He had a cat in his mouth.” I heard a spoon hit ceramic, and the table to my left fell silent. It wasn’t altogether clear whether the cat was a stray or the resident of some neighboring household. It didn’t altogether matter, at that point. What did matter was that she and Moses were officially living in two different worlds. One, a horror show. The other, a triumph. Amid the carnage and piercing, agonized howls he’d instigated, Moses was absolutely beaming.

  Terrified by Cody’s panic and likely anticipating some expression of food-aggression from Moses, Darby was pulling relentlessly, scrambling in the other direction with what must’ve been an adorable desperation, panicked paws sputtering, practically carving evidence of the whole ordeal into the sidewalk. Seizing Moses by the collar with one hand, Cody looped the smaller dog’s leash onto the fence with the other and turned to the unfolding torture scene. “Not knowing what else to do, I reached inside Moses’s mouth, and of course he just clenched his jaws around the cat, even tighter.” Our waitress stopped in her tracks, close enough for me to see her eyes widen in a sideways glance. A crowd of onlookers was forming off U Street. Tears poured forth, mostly from adrenaline, as Cody pried Moses’s jaws apart. The insistence with which he was seizing his prey had cut wounds into her hands, and she began visualizing the unknowns of the stray cat’s blood, comingling with hers. “I thought, Great, now I’ve got hepatitis.” I could practically hear every head within earshot spin in our direction. It was as though I had an app on my phone, randomly generating unsettling non sequiturs.

  Then, as if on cue, she took it to eleven: “I don’t know if it was like what you hear about happening in executions, or if Moses had just punctured the cat’s bowels, but I was suddenly covered in shit.” The hipsters closed their menus.

  She couldn’t remember how, but she managed to free the cat from Moses’s jaws. “But it was totally mangled and all kinds of fucked up; hobbling and howling.” Cody had a cat, herself, and was a devotee of the species. Few things could’ve been more visually traumatizing. Her sobbing took on a second wave—this time out of the sheer irrevocability of what was transpiring. Suddenly, as if mounting a “fuck you” to her shock and sadness, the cat—still not quite dead—started hissing, stumbling over itself, charging back at Moses, provoking him. “I was in awe. Like, how fucking stupid could this cat be?” Without warning, Moses struck, snatching it back into his jaws. The number of onlookers spiked with the sudden re-escalation. People were jumping out of their cars. One inexplicably leapt out brandishing a bat, threatening to beat Moses, if Cody didn’t kick him. “I didn’t want him intervening. So I did it.” The blow was clumsy and ineffectual. Moses startled, but his prey was not dislodged. Such a blunt gesture could scarcely do more than compound an already obscene comedy. “I still feel bad about it. I mean, I straight up kicked that dog in the face.” Chairs could now be heard, scooting away from us.

  For no particular reason, without prompting, Moses released the cat. As if he’d simply lost interest, oblivious to the carnage and exasperation he’d foisted onto the world. Shaking, sobbing, Cody pulled out her BlackBerry to dial animal control. The cat had pulled itself behind a fire hydrant, writhing and wailing in the background. “I looked up D.C. animal control’s number, and as I was doing it, I could see I was pressing blood and actual shit into my BlackBerry’s keyboard.” Two tables in our vicinity promptly emptied, without warning. Our waitress was visibly annoyed. Looking up into the street as she listened to the ringing on the other end of the line, Cody could see the size of her audience, and snapped into a sort of self-awareness. “I was covered in blood, shit, and tears. So was my phone. And I was pressing it into my ear. Everyone watching must’ve wanted to ask me out.” Wiping her nose with her sleeve, she let the state of her wretched spectacle sink in. A full day of walks remained. As animal control took their time in arriving, the cat passed unceremoniously, in likely and rather senseless agony. The crowd dispersed. Moses and Darby were returned to their homes. Every adjacent table was now emptying, as Cody explained that the people who’d hired her to walk Moses seemed more suspicious about how he got ahold of a cat than they were concerned with her well-being, physical or otherwise. Cody biked back up Meridian Hill to her next set of clients, a few minutes behind schedule.

  And we finished brunch, as if our conversation had been completely normal.

  * A wing-nut denomination of anarchist hostile to technology, civilization, and (in some cases) even language.

  12

  MOVING TARGETS

  When Pierre L’Enfant designed D.C., a central feature
of his task was making the city difficult to invade. It’s legendary for confounding tourists and newcomers alike, despite not being meaningfully any more complicated than Manhattan. The city’s laid out on what is in effect a modified grid, with diagonal corridors cutting through it, forming sharply angled intersections at various points, with the District’s signature circular nodes scattered throughout. Viewed from above, or with experience, it’s fairly intuitive and navigable. At street level, it can feel like a maze.

  In the fall of 2002, L’Enfant’s plan was given a modern-day test-drive, when John Allen Muhammad, a veteran of the first Gulf War, and Lee Boyd Malvo, his stepson, carried out a three-week, slow-motion rampage of random sniper shootings across the metro D.C. area. By the time they were taken into custody, they’d killed ten people. In the thick of it, as the shock of each successive shooting escalated local panic, surprisingly few leads emerged. A white delivery van here. Some other description elsewhere. It was as though the shooter were simply dissolving into the surroundings, the local population hunted by a ghost. In the end, it was a fairly nondescript sedan, from which random people were picked off with a Bushmaster XM-15 rifle, at considerable distance. Usually, within a stone’s throw of a highway on-ramp, or some major state route.

  Only one of the murders occurred inside the District, and—at that—only a few blocks across the border from Maryland, on a major north–south artery. The city’s design seemed to retain the protective function L’Enfant had hoped it would, even in reverse. The shooters appeared to have concluded they couldn’t have easily staged an attack deep within its borders and had recourse to an efficient escape route. Maryland and Virginia suffered the brunt of the death toll, as a result. Bodies stilled or bleeding out in strip-mall parking lots, or outside gas stations.

  Of course, this was just over a year after the September 11 attack on the Pentagon, and as things were unfolding, no one knew where the next shooting would occur. So, even as it became apparent the killings were largely a suburban phenomenon, paranoia gripped the District. Schools stopped having outdoor recess. People stopped filling up their gas tanks, for fear of what might happen if anyone stood still too long. Offices allowed employees to work from home. Commercial rhythms dropped off abruptly; no one wanted to walk to the store, or the café, or anywhere that would leave them exposed. Everywhere, people seemed visibly shaken. And everywhere, extraordinary shifts occurred to absorb and accommodate that terror.

  As with most such threats, the way it was discussed sat some distance from the way it played out in the real world. Most white Americans—despite an existential foundation in and continued enthusiasm for breathtaking acts of violence—are mostly oblivious as to what life looks or feels like when it’s acted on by any force greater than themselves. We’re content to mine our own imaginations, assured of our own special circumstances, at a safe distance from anyone with direct experience—whose accounts are often so recurrent that they blur into white noise. For many places in the world, anguish, humiliation, and memory all mostly figure as dull aches woven into whatever new normal violence produces. With little other choice, lives go on. People fall in love. Children are born. Art is made. Poetry is written. Somehow. During the very dates in question, the Israeli human-rights group B’Tselem recorded more than twice as many Palestinian civilians killed by Israeli snipers, while mothers gave birth in cars and elders died of heart attacks waiting to pass checkpoints; all financed and diplomatically insulated by staggering sums in U.S. aid. As Muhammed and Malvo stalked the metro D.C. region, the United States was a full year into occupying Afghanistan, deputizing warlords and narco-traffickers, when its own soldiers weren’t gunning down civilians. Within six months, it would illegally invade and occupy Iraq. And eventually, we’d all be invited to empathize with one of its most fundamentalist and lethal zealots, in a film that could’ve just as likely immortalized the Beltway shootings: American Sniper. The fulcrum on which such terms toggle between terrifying and heroifying suggests a hierarchy of intelligibility in the domains of fear, suffering, and bodily harm. Some fear is more real than others. Even when it’s not.

  Meanwhile, I was walking dogs.

  Out in the open. Four to five hours a day, in broad daylight.

  Perhaps more significantly, I was often spitting distance from an entrance to the Rock Creek Parkway, Connecticut Avenue, or Sixteenth Street—all major northbound corridors to the Beltway. My boss gave us permission to shorten walks to reduce exposure, if we felt unsafe, as though the routine of our movements wouldn’t have made us as easy to case, regardless. Some of the clients were just staying home from work—and I was still being paid to show up at their homes, to spare them going outdoors any more than was absolutely necessary. I watched whole neighborhoods go very nearly silent, practically reduced to ghost towns.

  I didn’t resent the expectation that I continue working, inasmuch as I didn’t feel altogether threatened. Autumn in the District is bested only by spring, and I honestly kind of relished the bizarre and unlikely sort of privacy I’d suddenly acquired. What did seem strange was the standard of danger or threat applied in the whole story, which itself seemed to prop up a delusional construction of urban life.

  To hear other dog walkers tell it—and I’m speaking, here, of women and transgender dog walkers—walking the District never felt safe. It was (and remains) a gauntlet of unwanted interactions, catcalls, stalking, and threats of everything from rape to murder. Ask any not-male dog walker how many shitty interactions they’ve had with men that day, and you’re likely to hear harrowing stories. Simply doing their job requires walking into the lion’s den of patriarchal social relations; a nonnegotiable hours-long daily immersion in men’s entitlement to their bodies, their attention, and their sexuality. The quiet war to which women are subjected broadly, is magnified, intensified, and situated as an occupational hazard.

  According to a two-thousand-person international study commissioned by Stop Street Harassment and conducted by the surveying firm GfK, 65 percent of women surveyed experienced street harassment. Of that percentage, at least 70 percent reported harassment ranging from honking and leering from passing cars, to whistling and kissing noises, to sexist and sexually explicit comments, to vulgar gestures. Smaller—but nonetheless sizable—percentages reported their path being blocked by a stranger, or being the target of public masturbation. Twenty percent of women surveyed had been followed by someone on the street. Twenty-three percent had been sexually touched or groped in some way. Nine percent had been forced into some sexual act. It warrants repeating that these are the realities of women going about normal daily routines. Going to work. Getting coffee. Running errands. Exercising. Using taxis. Riding public transit. Fetching their kids from school or daycare. It amounts to, in every meaningful way, a psychic siege. Factor in that it’s a dog walker’s job to be walking that world, exposed, the better part of the working day, and the landscape quickly comes into terrifying focus.

  You’d think the presence of a dog, or especially a pack of dogs, would be a deterrent. And you’d be wrong. Browse community forums, Google relevant search terms—and you quickly find myriad accounts of women walking their own dogs navigating unwelcome behavior from men, and the often elaborate routines women undertake to minimize the very real risks that come with it. For dog walkers, there’s the added vulnerability of moving in and out of enclosed spaces. Keying into a (male) client’s apartment, to then find them home unexpectedly, has a completely different set of risks for women—to say nothing of any recourse a walker would have were a client to engage in unwelcome behavior. What pet-care agency is going to take a hit to revenue (both real, and potential—existing clients always represent a referral vector), or risk potential litigation from well-resourced clients, when they can simply replace a walker with whom there’s been “a problem”?

  Predictably, I’ve never once heard the issue of street harassment or the threat of violence embedded within it mentioned by the pet-care industry, despite that the
very service upon which they’re premised forces a significant number of people to live in a sort of increased exposure, like bartenders before indoor smoking bans. This goes for the two major professional associations that represent the pet-care industry, as well as outfits where I was employed. No partnering with anti–street harassment organizations. No explicit allowances or policy for shortening walks in the face of harassment or threatening behavior. No assurance that the workplace will go to bat for someone in cases where that would prove useful. Not even the offer of funded self-defense classes. The fact that this collective shrug strikes anyone in the industry as even defensible is absolutely galling. It reflects a frankly shocking disregard for the lives and well-being of real people; perhaps a microcosm of the callousness with which the issue is treated more broadly.

  Even just a moment’s reflection on the numbers ought to provoke a deep and visceral shame, if not blood-boiling rage: in the fall of 2002, public life in and around D.C. ground to a slow ebb because ten people in a population of roughly three million were killed by a team of fringe sociopaths. Both the victims and the perpetrators represented negligible fractions of a percentage of the sample population. Comparatively, the percentage of women reporting being physically violated by strangers on the street nearly breaks double digits; their assailants not some anomalous sliver of their world, but rather saturating the field. Women are routinely attacked, carrying the constant threat of such attacks as a baseline bit of vigilance; a default feature of emotional life. Indefinitely. Without meaningful spatial limitations. Without meaningful refuge in which to even exhale.

  And nothing. No crisis. No threat to public life perceived. No collective obligation to accommodate that terror together, or undertake measures against it. It’s not even named. The experiences of those who shoulder the emotional and psychological labor of surviving that onslaught simply don’t count. It is an extraordinary feat of collective denial. And it makes moments like the Beltway sniper saga seem childish and wildly lacking in perspective.