Jake is determined and enterprising. He will go for that stray piece of kibble. Once I find only his hindquarters and tail sticking out from under a three-hundred-year-old writing desk that’s topped by a high glass bookcase. This secretary has teetered before without provocation, but it is oddly stable now. I hold on to it and watch Jake slither smoothly out from beneath, crunching a single piece of dog food, his froglike back legs pressed to the floor as though he were hipless. I know that mice can do this sort of thing, but how does the dog make himself that flat?
Clearly Kennel Up needs augmentation. I’d like to say, Stop @#$%# hopping, but I’m not sure Jake would understand it. So instead I stop walking, food bowl in hand, every time he hops. The first time I do this, Jake is clearly bewildered. He hops a little higher, a little faster—boing, boing, boing, boing—every hop a prompt to get me going again. (I realize then that Jake’s frantic hopping has made me walk a little faster with the bowl, but now when his hopping makes me stop, I have undone all the careful training he has given me.) For a couple of days he tests my will in this, scrambling, spinning, hopping straight up like he is catching a Frisbee, shooting me a dirty look every time I stop. And behind the door in the laundry room, a rabble of angry Poms are impatient too. They bark: Hey, us! Hey, food! Hey, us! Hey, food! Hey-hey-hey!
It would be so easy to give in.
But on the third day, God created understanding. And obedience. I pick up Jake’s bowl and he trots to his crate and sits inside while I rest his bowl on a bookcase and feed two other dogs in their crates on the way. We are officially hop-free. Jake’s self-discipline is coming along. Now to explore what else he wants to offer.
Jake Piper has the gift of gaze, and he’s looking at me from the end of our long hallway. He is a ghostly little figure on this rainy morning in November, sitting in his good-boy posture, bathed in the soft light through the tall windows on either side of our old house. He’s still thinner than he should be, but the harsh outlines of his ribs have faded, and his hipbones no longer jut out. Still, even Jake’s best friends might call him funny-looking. From here, I can see the several breeds wrestling across his appearance, this boy with coltish legs and misdirected ears and curious, bendy tail, but his gaze is steady and thoughtful, his intelligence obvious. Jake has beautiful eyes, dark almonds rimmed with black.
“Guyliner,” a friend calls this look. A little bit goth. A little bit rock-and-roll. A little bit Winona Ryder, if she were a small, spotted dog.
He has a lot of patience for a youngster, but from down the hallway, he’s urging me with those electric eyes. He’s learned the Sit and Stay commands, and I have put him in that Sit, walked to the end of the house, and stood very near the treat drawer. I can see that Jake’s every muscle wants him to get up and force the issue. But he holds his Sit, head tilting this way and that while he waits for the word of release. In a farther room, the Poms are protesting because they aren’t in on the action, whatever it is. Two cats watch from my bedroom doorway. They look at Jake with their ears swung back, speculative. They like to watch this training stuff from a distance. For them, newcomer Jake is still a guided missile likely to go off the grid.
He watches and waits. I touch the treat drawer, and I see him lick his lips, legs quivering.
“Jakey, come!” I say, and he springs forward so strongly that the cats watching from doorways scramble, their backs arched and tails bushed out. Jake is still unpredictable. He clatters down the hallway, puts on the brakes in the kitchen too late, backpedals a little like Elmer Fudd, and slams into the cabinet door beneath the treat drawer. Unfazed, after the slide and the bang, he looks up at me with a loopy grin, adopting a second Sit required for the treat. Those dark eyes are bright. A thread of drool slips out of his mouth and onto the floor. He gets a Milk-Bone and a homemade peanut butter kiss and a Good-boy-oh-what-a-good-boy-you-are-so-very-good-Jake-Piper!
Jake capers a little when he finishes his treats, then drops to a third Sit, looking up at me fondly. I kneel down to him, holding his gaze. Treats are great rewards for Jake, but in its way, bound up with pride, affection, and reward, human connection is even better.
“You’re a good boy, aren’t you, Jakey P?” I murmur.
He leans in, looks tenderly into my eyes, and burps.
And then there is the opinion of Maddye, the cat. Maddye is a senior tortoiseshell, a most ancient crone approaching sixteen. She is one of two cats here. She is older than every other animal in the house, and, a rescue herself, she has seen the other rescues come and go—a whole host of foster dogs that either went to other homes or lived with us until they died. She has been instrumental in raising and correcting them all.
Now she is not sure what to make of Jake Piper. When he first showed up, Maddye was nonplussed. How to understand a puppy that mostly slept and wobbled about the house like he was very, very old? For Maddye, he was a troubling oddity. He had a habit of napping wherever he landed when his energy failed. Often he flopped down in Maddye’s favorite sunning places or in the doorways of rooms she liked to haunt.
Early on, she avoided him altogether. I tried to imagine her cat sense of him: the strange appearance, the smell of illness and of vet clinic. But Maddye was certainly full of her own cat curiosity, and in time, she took to shadowing him from a distance. She would creep into rooms where he was sleeping and glare. Sometimes age got the better of her. More than once, I saw her stare melt into general drowsiness, and the old cat would fall asleep in her stalking place, her nose drooping to rest on the floor.
Later, she grew bolder. She crept close enough to sniff. If sleeping Jake twitched in a dream, back she’d jump, landing on light feet, then start the approach all over again. Maddye had an agenda. Jake’s disproportionate ears seemed to have a life of their own, waving gently beneath the ceiling fan. The cat was fascinated by those ears. Once she couldn’t resist the lightest touch with a paw, and Jake groaned in his sleep, which set Maddye back a few feet, wide-eyed. She would try again later. She got away with the stolen ear-tap a few times, and then she was bored with getting away with it. I’m convinced the old cat was ready to start something. One late evening, Maddye decided to bring it. I saw the splendid cat moment of poise, her paw raised and slightly curled for a long moment before—wham! wham-wham-wham-wham-wham!—she smacked sleeping Jake’s ear hard.
Jake made a cartoon yoik, and Maddye dashed off with a screech—It is alive! Alive!—Jake scrambling after her and barking at the top of his lungs. It was the first bark I had ever heard from the puppy. He didn’t catch her, but a line had been drawn.
Now Maddye frequently slaps Jake awake. Jake, in turn, has begun to seek Maddye out during her own naps. She likes to tuck up in precarious places to catch the sun—the arms of chairs, the edge of desktops, narrow windowsills. I often wonder how she doesn’t fall. Maddye’s naps grow longer as she ages, and I can’t always find her when I come into the house, but Jake can. More than once, he startles Maddye awake, leaping into the chair or bouncing up to hit the desk with his forepaws. She always scrambles. Sometimes she spits. It’s a most satisfying result for Jake, whose good-natured harassment never crosses the line into real threat.
But as he gets taller and stronger, and I’m aware of his increasing prey drive, I begin to discourage Jake from taunting Maddye. Cat-friendliness is a requirement for dogs in this house, and while I feel sure he wouldn’t hurt her intentionally, he’s big enough now that he might.
“Jake, Leave the Kitty!” I say when I catch him about to flush her out of her sleep spot. He looks surprised, but he stops. After a few rounds of the Leave the Kitty command, he stops hassling Maddye when I say it, though there’s real disappointment on his face.
There’s intelligence too.
One afternoon I’m in the kitchen prepping vegetables for a salad, and I hear the tip-tip-tip, huff-huff-huff that says Jake is behind me working scent. It sounds very much like he has found the cat. I turn and spot Maddye tucked up on the edge of a chair, head bowed
to the upholstered seat. She is snoring. Jake has tiptoed up to stand very still about six inches from her sleeping place. One snort, one bark, one paw on the edge of the chair, would startle her awake. Moreover, based on where she’s sleeping, she’s likely to go straight over the side of the chair and into the water bowl beneath. Though I don’t think Jake processes all that, he would no doubt like to dunk the cat.
“Jake . . .” I’m about to caution him when the dog looks up at me, looks at Maddye, and then looks up at me again, his expression transparent.
Give me a reason, he seems to say. Give me one...good...reason...why I shouldn’t.
Theorists will tell you background and breed traits are important qualifiers for working dogs. Some theorists go on to say that the breed that dominates in a mixed-breed dog’s genetic makeup may be a strong predictor of the dog’s success at work. This could be interesting. What if through some doggy liaison Jake Piper looks something like a shepherd but acts more like a Shih Tzu?
Friends are speculative. They’re pretty sure they see German shepherd, pit bull terrier, maybe even a little Labrador retriever. Will Jake’s unknown mix result in a fabulous dog willing to learn anything or a conflicted dog with disastrous impulses? The good news: Jake seems to come from working breeds. The bad news: Jake is unlikely ever to win a beauty pageant.
We move forward with basic good-dog training and an eye to Jake’s aptitudes. Now that he’s healthy enough to play without getting winded and to come upstairs without collapsing, it’s time to see if Jake wants to be a working dog. Just what would he most likely enjoy doing? Search-and-rescue? Arson detection? Therapy? Service? Of course, there’s a chance Jake won’t be suited for work at all. Which is fine. Anyone who’s come home to an overjoyed dog knows that love can be more than enough.
13
HER HAND WOULD SHUSH the alarm clock before it made a second ping, like a fledgling being sat on by a mother bird wary of cats. She had a pathological fear of being late. Merion tells me it was ridiculous, that constant awareness, even dread, of time, but in her worst days she had actually been afraid of what might happen if she rolled over a little more slowly, put her feet to the floor a half a beat after she should. To do so would open the door to all kinds of trouble. She never let time get away. Her routine through the house was so tightly clocked and narrowly grooved that she actually wore paths in the carpet. Her daughters shook their heads and pointed it out; her youngest grandson had chugged his feet along the track between living room, bedroom, and kitchen making choo-choo sounds last Christmas. They all laughed about it, but “Jesus,” Merion says, “it would have been good not to carry the weight of time on my back everywhere, like it was the only truth, like I alone was responsible for the pulse of the world.”
She is tall and elegant and beautifully composed. She is also a widow. She has been alone for several years. A longtime educator, with her punctuality, neat handwriting, and due diligence in all corners, she successfully hid the whole mess of herself from everyone for a good long while. Correction: She thought she was hiding the whole mess of herself from everyone, until two of the newer teachers in her school made complaints about her that fell somewhere between “creating a hostile work environment” and “harassment.”
Merion has always kept an eye on things. She walks the halls of her school. A few years ago, she began looking into classrooms a lot. (Maybe too much.) Unused to these supervisory rituals, the two new teachers resented the once-an-hour routine of her opening the door to their rooms, peering in, taking a student head count, and shutting the door again. Merion’s habit took root after the Columbine shooting. The older teachers never seemed to have a problem with it (they were all jumpy then), so they didn’t complain even when their head’s behavior escalated from an every-two-hour check to a once-an-hour walkthrough. Even the students mostly ignored her. But more recent students seemed to feel these new teachers’ angry tension, and Merion sensed it wouldn’t be long until “classroom disruption” was added to the list of complaints on her annual evaluation. The very idea made her feel sick.
She knew she was overdoing it. She didn’t know how to stop.
These young teachers were newly schooled and terribly current on their rights. They seemed to Merion bristly with antennae, waiting for some slight or harm. It was all very procedural. They spoke between themselves and then spoke privately to her. It was made clear: When you keep checking on the classroom, we feel as though you don’t trust us. She felt her gut tightening in the presence of that deferential first challenge. She answered them more harshly than she meant to. Her school, her rules. There had never been any trouble here, and there was a reason for that. Merion says she knows how to be more collegial—she could have given excuses that mollified them or made them laugh; she could have made some attempt to back down to the old two-hour check she’d done for years; she could simply have told them the truth and said that she was working on it. But she felt herself getting older and more fragile. Her center wavered. It was harder to contain.
And all this time management and double-checking her classrooms took her away from other administrative duties, duties that had to be performed far faster than they used to. Some of her superiors complained that her response time back to them was slower; they expected same-day e-mail responses, and they couldn’t reach her by phone. So the long and short of it was she was in trouble at work—stunned to find herself in this position after more than two decades of strong service.
A meeting with one administrator led to a meeting with a counselor, who went on to advise an appointment with a therapist. Merion sat with the thoughtful young woman for two sessions, her guts quivering, mentally ticking off the cost by the minute before she talked her way back to Columbine and then back farther, to the loss of a brother in a drive-by shooting while they waited together for a school bus when she was eight years old. She barely remembered the event, she said to the therapist, but she cried as though she remembered it too well. A screech of tires, voices shouting. Pop, pop, pop. Her brother was down. Her brother was gone.
Children killing children with such casual malice.
Merion still doesn’t understand how this relates to her stranglehold on time, but she’s smart enough to understand that nothing good comes from it. There was catastrophic thinking on every side—a world of imagined things would fall apart if she didn’t operate on schedule; a number of equally bad things could happen if she did, one of which was losing a job she needed in a profession she loved. She needed help and feared it. She feared medication most of all.
After several months of sessions, her therapist suggested that an assistance dog might help. She said there were all kinds of things these dogs could do to redirect obsessive thoughts and compulsive behaviors. They worked very well with thoughtful, analytic personalities.
A dog? Merion thought. She’d never had a dog. She didn’t hate them, but she didn’t love them. They could be nice, sure. Smart, maybe. But really, she had no clue about dogs at all. “My God,” she said. She remembers looking at her watch and glancing at door. “Don’t dogs take a lot of time?”
Ten years ago, six months ago, one day ago, Merion would not have been able to imagine herself here, sitting in an unfamiliar house, upright in her good casual clothes, her back not touching the chair. Trying not to show how scared she was. There was a magazine upside down on a table: “Ten Ways to Be the Best You Ever,” she read, or something like that, and the promise seemed ludicrous. She was waiting for the sight of a dog that might change her life.
Merion had been up since dawn preparing herself, which was a little harder when it was possible you might walk out the door empty-handed and come back with a seventy-five-pound stranger ahead of you on a leash. Her never-had-a-dogness felt pretty overwhelming at dawn. Would the creature really foul the floors and pepper the upholstery with fleas? At 7:30 in the morning, she found herself fiddling and fussing with a tag on the bottom of a new water bowl, bought especially for the day when she actually me
t the right dog. Damn sticky tag should have come right off, but it didn’t. She picked and scrubbed at it until the pads of her fingers stung, then stood with her eyes closed, the warm water running over her hands. Then, for some reason she doesn’t quite understand, she dried the bowl, set it neatly aside, went into the bathroom, rummaged through her late husband’s things, and clipped her hair close. What was this? A real buzzcut. With every pass of the clippers, she felt lifted and naked and new.
Sitting in her nice slacks and houndstooth jacket, Merion could feel wind across her scalp. Last time that had happened, she was a baby.
Why exactly did she cut off her hair?
What would these people think of her?
Did she care?
Merion says now she thinks maybe almost bald suits her. Maybe she looks proud and strong, not like the victim of a fever or the survivor of a war. At the time, however, she wasn’t so sure. When her therapist saw her, she said only, “I’m jealous. You’ve got the cheekbones to pull that off.” Merion’s mother had the cheekbones, and her brother, from what she remembers of him.
God, she was nervous, thinking about anything in order to take the pressure off the moment. It had been forever since she trusted anyone other than herself, and now she was about to hand it all over to a dog.
A door opened, then closed. Merion heard a jingle of tags and a steady pad-pad-pad and someone talking low. Then the dog was in the room. The dog was not that large, but she seemed to fill the space, or maybe Merion pushed everything else aside at the sight of her: a fawn-and-black beast with huge upright ears. The dog stood in the room as though she owned it; she’d been fostered here awhile. The dog lifted her head thoughtfully, flicked an ear: strangers.
The Possibility Dogs Page 12