Sleeps with Dogs

by Lindsey Grant

  Only then could I release Slinky from her crate to get her fair shake at a walk and her chance to get wet and dirty herself. The visit was running outrageously long and would undoubtedly throw the rest of my walks off schedule, never mind the extreme traffic delays that always came along with a little rainfall in the Bay Area. There was nothing to be done for it except to keep moving forward as quickly as possible.

  Walking Slinky through the neighborhood was by far the easiest part of the visit, even if it was raining. Our greatest challenge proved avoiding broken glass on the sidewalks of the neighborhood. Her leg was healing quickly, and she pranced along without any indication of a limp, sidestepping the bigger puddles gracefully.

  When we finished, I took my time with her on the front stoop, using one of my own towels from the car to dry her off and clean the street grit out of her paw pads. She tolerated me burying my face in the downy fluff behind her ears, still so soft even though it was damp. Zipper could hear us out on the porch, and she scratched at the front door impatiently. But if I took Slinky inside right away, she’d be quickly overwhelmed by the bigger dogs angling for attention. We had to enjoy our one-on-one time apart from the others.

  I commanded Zipper and Rascal to wait while I gave Slinky her treat—this one a dietary supplement with ample vitamins for her healing foreleg. We both had to be on point in order to execute the transaction without any thievery of said snack. As I shut Slinky in her crate, I slipped her one extra treat on the sly for being such a good girl.

  I had a bad and very embarrassing habit of making up songs about my dogs. I had no reason to feel selfconscious singing to them or making silly professions of love because—unlike my previous bird charges—the dogs weren’t talking to anyone. And no one else was around. I often didn’t even realize when I was singing to them, so second nature had my one-way conversations with the animals become.

  Slinky’s little ditty was to the tune of Robert De Niro’s song for Jinx, the cat in Meet the Parents: “Slinky dog, Slinky dog, I love you, yes IIIIIII dooooo.”

  As was increasingly my custom, I sang to her in farewell. I didn’t have a special song for Rascal or Zipper, so they were subjected to Slinky’s serenade as I took my leave.

  It wasn’t until the next week that I saw the webcam, its telltale red light glowing from atop the dresser, trained on Slinky’s crate and the room beyond. This was an early model, the Ping-Pong-ball-sized camera set on flexible rubber legs. I couldn’t say whether it had been there all along, or whether this was a new addition. The owners’ had left no note, and I genuinely could not remember ever having seen it there before.

  Had they witnessed the whole bed-blow-drying debacle? I certainly hadn’t mentioned it to them, nor they to me. And how much of that would have been visible within the frame of the camera? And if it was new, had they installed it because their bed was weird when they got home last week? Or had they noticed an entire roll of paper towels wadded up in the trash? Was this a live feed, or were they also recording, like CCTV? Could they hear me? How many times had they witnessed me singing that ridiculous song to Slinky?

  In a panic over what her owners may have seen or overheard, I wondered if they were watching me that very moment. I smiled and waved at the little robotic ball on its flexible rubber legs, hoping I looked completely at ease on candid camera.

  I’d started keeping a running log of insider secrets, a sort of, “Things I wish I’d known then …” list of tips. It had started with, “BYOB: Bring your own bedding. And coffee!” This was followed by “Birds can be assholes,” and, “No matter how ready you think you are, reread those instructions.” More recently I’d added, “Don’t go over the fence; go around it.” (So many months later, I should’ve known better than to try going under the fence. Same principle, with an even more humiliating outcome.)

  And at the end of the list: “Even if the owners aren’t home, they are always watching.”

  Hi Susan,

  Has Maddie been getting into the cat food? When I arrived today there was some mystery kibble on the kitchen floor next to her water bowl, and her runny stool suggests she ate something she shouldn’t have. I cleaned up the food and put the bag of puppy chow out of reach, but I know she’s a smart girl and has her ways of finding forbidden things to eat …

  Lindsey

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Wolf Pack

  I unlocked the wrought iron outer door and then the second wooden door, leaning my weight against it until it gave a groan and opened. A swirling cloud of fine white feathers greeted me at the threshold.

  “Maddie?” I called, confused by what or who might have caused the explosion of down that I was now wading through. I knew Susan’s son Trevor was not there, given the absence of his ancient Datsun from the gravel parking pad out front. According to plan, Maddie should’ve been crated in the back corner of the kitchen when he left.

  In response to my voice, Ash, the new puppy of the house, came charging into the living room. He slid into my feet, Risky Business–style, setting off another flurry of feathers.

  “What are you doing in here?” I reached down and rubbed his tummy. Ash was supposed to be sequestered in the backyard, not loose inside the house.

  Ash and Maddie were cousins. Or half siblings. Or just siblings. Though Maddie was full-grown and Ash just a pup, both were descended from the wolf mother and German shepherd father who lived in a chain-link partition behind the house across the street, along with an ever-changing assortment of their offspring.

  Ash was all white, like his dad. Maddie took more after her mother, the wolf unmistakable in her face and frame and coloring. The wolf mother had a permanent sneer from an old bullet wound—whether it was inflicted there in Oakland or before she was domesticated, I didn’t know. It gave her a sinister look, in contrast to Maddie’s sweet face and gentle, intelligent eyes.

  For all of her good-natured playfulness and irresistible lovability, Maddie was not an easy charge by any stretch. The wolf in her introduced all kinds of complications not faced by most other dogs. At least not in such an extreme combination of characteristics. As was common in wolf dogs, she was way too smart for her own good, strong as an ox, and a superior escape artist. She also had a highly sensitive stomach. Her digestive issues were not necessarily endemic to this hybrid but were further compounded by the specific and often divergent dietary needs of a half-wolf, half-canine. All of these challenges were intensified by the recent introduction of Ash, also a wolf dog, into the household.

  “All right mess-maker, did you get into a pillow fight?”

  Ash padded behind me into the kitchen, the feather storm making us both sneeze. I could only assume that he got ahold of a bolster or a blanket while he was on the loose that morning, and then did what any self-respecting wolf pup might: destroy. Whatever it was he got into, the feather-fall grew thicker the farther into the kitchen we ventured.

  In a small dining nook off the back of the kitchen, Maddie was indeed crated. She looked like a canine version of the Abominable Snowman, her mottled dove-gray and cream coat further lightened by a head-to-toe dusting of fine white down. Looking adorably innocent, Maddie dipped her head again to tear at the remains of what was, until recently, a mattress pad or comforter.

  “Oh, you’re the mess-maker!” She nuzzled at my fingers through the bars of her crate, licking them with a feather-flecked tongue.

  “Did your silly mama give you a feather bed? Those don’t really mix too well with wolves, huh?”

  I was quickly trying to calculate the next best step in this mess. Every time Ash moved, he sent another plume of feathers floating even farther afield. I could put him back in the yard and leave Maddie crated while I cleaned up, but I really needed Maddie out of her crate and out of the way so I could bag the remains of the cushion. She and Ash weren’t really supposed to be outside together unsupervised, though.

  “All right, kiddos,” I said, resolved to leave the cleaning until later. I unlatched the door of M
addie’s crate, and she tore down the hall to the flight of stairs that led to the bottom floor and backyard. I knew proper procedure would have been for me to make them both sit and stay at the top of the stairs and wait there for me to give them permission to proceed. Sometimes you have to pick your battles.

  At the base of the stairs that led to the backyard was Trevor’s room. His door was always shut, leaving the small landing in gloom. Today, however, the door was wide open, and I thought for a moment that Trevor was perhaps home after all.

  “Hello?” I ventured, suddenly feeling selfconscious about talking to the dogs so freely. I mentally reviewed what I’d been saying, hoping none of it was too ridiculous. Or openly critical of Trevor or Susan. The dogs were clamoring at the back door and wouldn’t be ignored.

  “Okay, okay, out you go,” I said, sneaking a glance over my shoulder into the dimly lit room as I unlocked the back door and released the hounds.

  His room was spartan, almost alarmingly so. Mattress on the floor, thin blanket thrown aside, guitar leaning against the wall, plain curtains closed. And no Trevor in sight. I relaxed a little.

  Interesting that their dog got the feather bed and he had a bare mattress on the floor. Maybe his squatter aesthetic was by choice.

  His open door had distracted me from noticing the window to the right of the back door, and Ash’s only point of entry from the yard into the house. The window was broken—and had been for a while—so Susan or Trevor had propped two brooms in an X over the opening. Ash clearly figured out that he could knock these aside in order to climb through the window. I scoffed under my breath at the notion that broomsticks were sincerely intended to keep a wolf pup outside.

  This client—Susan and her son—were not clients of my own, but one of the many jobs I took on in a subcontracting capacity. Thus, I didn’t have a direct dialogue with them but deferred to the authority of the colleagues I was working for. I know, however, due to my coworkers and my near-constant communication about these dogs’ well-being, that they’d requested many times that Susan fix the window. Word was that Trevor was supposed to take care of it.

  I peeked my head through the window to check on the dogs and saw that there was also a chair adjacent to the open window, further enabling Ash’s access from the patio. My deep and heartfelt eye-rolling was interrupted by Ash starting to take the trademark squat. I caught on just as Maddie did, and I could see her anticipating the treats he was about to drop for her to gobble up.

  Even in my short career of dog walking and animal nannying, I’d already encountered many dogs with strange and sometimes dangerous eating habits. There was the American bulldog who ate his owners’ gym socks at every opportunity. Or the corgi who preferred his dry food with a helping of raw broccoli and cauliflower on top. I pet-sat one weekend for a Rottweiler that I dubbed the Mulcher. She had a penchant for eating the dried leaves that littered the back patio, where she spent her days. Then she’d come inside and leave a loose, detritus-filled dump on the carpet. This I cleaned up with the industrial-grade Hoover the owners helpfully left out for this very reason. In all of these instances, the owners warned me in advance of their pets’ unusual predilections, which helped enormously in both preventing a problem but also in understanding what the hell I was looking at when I showed up to take care of said pet and clean up his or her messes.

  In the instance of Penny, a newly adopted Lab-terrier mix puppy, I hadn’t gotten the benefit of full disclosure. I was running blind when, on one of our neighborhood walks, Penny started to drag her butt on the grass. Worms? I didn’t think so. I knew from her paperwork she’d been spayed and vaccinated and microchipped prior to adoption. Along with all of those procedures, deworming was standard. Yet another detail I’d gathered during my glory days at the pet store, since I was the one who administered the thick yellow tonic to the incoming animals, and then got to flush the worms down the industrial disposal when they came out the other end.

  Farther along on our walk, Penny started dragging again, and I noticed that something bright red was crowning beneath her perky tail. Blood? Intestines? I was freaking out. I got down on my hands and knees for a better look, as more and more red bloomed from her bottom.

  Upon closer inspection, I could see that this was something inorganic. It had a little white tag on it, the tiny lettering hard to make out. I then did what one should never, ever do in this situation. Chalk it up to inexperience, but I bagged my hand, and I pulled. Lucky for me, the object had not become entangled in Penny’s innards, and it came out cleanly (a relative term) in my hand.

  JLo Intimates, the tag read. I was holding the owner’s undigested thong in my hand.

  I knew from my days at the pet store that there’s a technical term for Maddie’s own dietary anomaly. We had many an appalled dog-owner coming into the store to complain about this unattractive habit some dogs have of eating shit, a condition called coprophagia. We’d direct the customer to aisle two, top shelf, where they’d find tablets for this affliction. I can’t say how helpful the pills were in deterring their dogs, but they certainly didn’t work on our darling wolf mix. Bless her, this disgusting habit absolutely tore her already-sensitive stomach apart. Whether it was her own, or anyone else’s, she was indiscriminate in her partiality to poop. And if I didn’t move quickly, she was about to make a snack of Ash’s.

  “No!” I shouted, leaping through the open door to place myself between Ash and Maddie. I didn’t have time to grab the shovel in my mad dash, so I collared Maddie and took her with me to collect the pooper-scooper. But first, I sat down on the patio chair and looked into her precious face.

  “Hey, you know better! No, ma’am! No poop for you.” It was extremely hard to resist kissing her soft muzzle, but this was not a time for positive reinforcement. I was being as stern with her as I could manage, resisting her charms with all my might. She was a love, but this behavior had to stop.

  Maddie was on a very strict diet of boiled chicken and plain white rice, a combination that seemed to meet the three-prong requirements of going gentle on her stomach, providing protein for her wolf half, and satisfying the domesticated dog in her that could process carbs with alacrity. If she weren’t possessed of such a tender tummy, I feel sure she could have taken down all kinds of meat. I’d worked with a woman who regularly fed her German shepherd raw steaks and swore by the benefits for the dog, if not the expense, of such a high-quality regimen.

  This rice-and-chicken diet, while mostly successful in keeping Maddie fed and comfortable, her stools healthy and firm, was all-too-often interrupted. If not by the shit-eating she engaged in, then when, for example, she figured a way to get into Ash’s delectable puppy kibble. Or the food of Susan’s many cats, whose dishes sat out on the front patio, tempting Maddie every time she passed by.

  I kept a firm grip on Maddie’s collar, and we returned to Ash’s pile. She was way too fast for me, and there was no way I could let her go and clean up after him before she beat me to it. I quickly scooped up the offending mess and only released her collar once I’d dumped it into the trash can left out on the patio for just that purpose.

  Susan tried her very best. I knew that. She loved Maddie, and now Ash, fiercely. She closely followed the recommendations given by myself and the colleagues with whom I shared Maddie and Ash’s care. Except when she couldn’t. Susan worked irregular shifts and long hours, and she relied on Trevor to manage the house and the dogs in her frequent absences. This meant the fifty-pound bag of Ash’s food was often left out and open in the kitchen, where Maddie could dip her face right into it like a horse’s feed bag. Or else Ash was fed in plain view of an uncrated Maddie, setting him up to be body slammed aside by his much larger and hunger-motivated housemate.

  What seemed at first like carelessness or ineptitude on Trevor’s part was looking more and more like sabotage—of Susan’s intentions, us dog walkers’ efforts, and Maddie’s overall health and wellness.

  All I really knew of him was that he went to co
mmunity college, which explained his unpredictable schedule. He rarely spoke to me, and he made eye contact even less than that. When I would make an effort at conversation, or ask him questions about the dogs, I rarely got more than a mumbled reply.

  The backyard was basically a grassless wasteland of dust and rocks, enclosed by a ten-foot fence. In the corner, there was a stand of bamboo that Maddie loved to hide in. She’d carved out tunnels in the thicket that we couldn’t get to, and she would go to the bathroom there, where we couldn’t swoop and scoop right behind her. It was very frustrating. Try as we might, my fellow dog walkers and I had not yet succeeded in getting Susan to chop it all down. Susan had agreed that it needed to happen, of course. On multiple occasions. She said Trevor would do it.

  And so there we were, bamboo forest intact.

  I threw a filthy, fuzzless tennis ball for the dogs a few times to get some of their energy out and refreshed their water from the hose coiled at the side of the house. They each took a long drink before we headed out on our walk. Both dogs were enthusiastic pullers, still learning how to heel on command—though with enough practice, they’d eventually do it without me even having to ask. They wore pronged collars to which I attached their heavy-duty canvas leashes.

  Ash was still at prime learning age, while Maddie should have mastered the simple command long ago. My hunch, based on her extreme intelligence, was that she fully understood; she just didn’t care to comply. Maddie was, more than any other dog I cared for, that most devilish combination of cute and headstrong.

  They went on-leash by the back door. Then, we practiced heeling at the base of the stairs, again at the landing where the stairs turned, and at the top of the flight. It didn’t go well, both dogs sneezing heavily at the feathers drifting down the stairs like snow, and otherwise generally disregarding my instructions in their enthusiasm to hit the road.