Dogged Pursuit

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Dogged Pursuit Page 16

by Robert Rodi


  Of all the stupid moves—I’ve left the car in gear! It’s now rolling across the flat, tundralike landscape, the door hanging open and Dusty looking out the rear window with an expression of nascent concern.

  I scramble to my feet and give chase, but skidding along the icy ground the car slowly picks up speed. Nothing exceptional—it can’t be going much more than ten miles an hour—but it’s enough to keep me galloping after it in vain, wildly cursing every deity from Jehovah to Shiva.

  Somewhere in the midst of this hideous pursuit, it occurs to me that it’s an almost perfect metaphor for my agility career: I keep trying harder and harder, yet my goal pulls ever farther away from me. It seems the universe is trying to tell me something (while having a good laugh at my expense).

  Well, fine. Point taken, universe. And by the way, screw you.

  I’m gasping for air now—my lungs raked by jagged icicles—when I realize that the car is cruising sedately toward a denuded tree. I don’t know whether to be happy or horrified and haven’t yet decided when the passenger side makes contact, scraping into the tree trunk and coming to an ugly halt.

  A few seconds later, I reach the scene and survey the damage. There’s a big, long gouge in the exterior; I wail like a baby seal at the sight of it. Then I feel a spasm of guilt that I’ve surveyed the car’s condition before that of my dog. I peer into the back window and there he is, sitting primly in his seat harness and looking at me in much the way Miss Daisy looked at Hoke when she’d had quite enough of needless delays.

  My brow, already slick with cold sweat, fires up in irritation. I’m glad Dusty’s fine, of course, but does he have to be lofty? Another sign from the cosmos. We’re not on the same page, not in the same book—we never are. We never were. I sigh and stand upright, and a branch of the tree pokes me right behind my glasses.

  Cursing again—and crying too, both from frustration and, excuse me, ow, my eye—I walk around the front of the car, realizing as I do that this is a stupid thing to risk. The thing’s still in gear, for God’s sake. Fortunately, the universe decides I don’t actually need to be run over to get the message it’s sending me.

  I get back inside and slam the door shut. As I buckle up, I become aware of the spatters of viscous blood all over my coat front. I look in the rearview mirror and see that I’m back to gushing like an oil well. The exclamation point on today’s epiphany. All right, okay, you win.

  I look over my shoulder to where Dusty sits with his head blithely cocked, and tell him, “Okay, boy! That was it! That was your career. You can rest easy now, ’cause it’s over. O-v-e-r. We are never doing this again.”

  To calm myself for the drive home, I pull a disc at random from the glove box. It’s another jazz outing, 1964’s The Lonely Hours by Sarah Vaughan. Within a few minutes she’s woefully wailing:

  Friendless, there’s not a soul to care

  I’m friendless, nobody anywhere . . .

  A life of desolation is all I see ahead

  And in my desperation I wish that I were dead

  I reach over and turn it off. I’m just not in the mood for anything so fucking chipper.

  Part Three

  CHAPTER 22

  The Leash Tugs Both Ways

  For a few weeks, I don’t even think about it. In fact I throw myself back into the activities I’ve so long left neglected. I dust off my chef’s hat and cook up a storm, filling the house with extravagant aromas. I go back to swimming three times a week, and am soon up to thirty-two laps—a solid mile. I bone up on my Italian, memorizing poetry by reciting it aloud while walking Dusty and Carmen—the only physical activity we now share.

  I also begin an exhaustive trawl through the works of Noël Coward. They’ve been sitting on my shelf for years, but now I’ve obtained the perfect complement: a newly released DVD collection of his major plays, as produced by the BBC in the 1980s. Each day I read the text of one of them in the morning, and then watch the corresponding DVD in the afternoon. It immerses me in a bracingly alien world of endless cocktails, dressing for dinner, and giddily casual immorality. Not a dog to be seen. Though there’s a moment in act one of Hay Fever, when someone in the self-consciously bohemian Bliss clan notices that the family dog, Zoe, hasn’t been in for her breakfast, and it’s darkly conjectured that she might have fallen into a river (though the housekeeper scoffs at this—“She too wily”). Two acts later, the play ends with the following day’s breakfast, and there’s not been another word said about Zoe. Did she ever come in, I can’t help wondering? Is she all right? And would it kill anyone in this underemployed bunch to go out and throw a ball for her every now and then?

  So yes, dogs apparently remain near the top of my hierarchy of priorities, but I no longer associate them reflexively with A-frames, weave poles, qualifying scores, and collapsible furniture. In fact it’s a bit surprising how little yesterday’s obsession impinges on today’s train of thought.

  Then one day I’m clicking through my log of TiVo recordings, deleting all the episodes of Iron Chef I thought I’d catch up with but now realize I never will, and I come across the AKC Agility Invitational—the national championships, the big event of the year, the one I ridiculously imagined I had a chance of reaching with Dusty. (To make it to the championships, you need six excellent double Qs and four hundred points from the previous year. Me, I barely made it out of novice.) I have to laugh. That sad delusion suddenly seems a lifetime ago.

  Before I know it, I find myself pressing Play. I tell myself I’ll just watch a few minutes.

  The show is hosted by someone named Bob Goen, who presumably I am supposed to recognize; he has that insinuating “here I am again in your living room” demeanor that show business creatures often cultivate. He breathily confesses that he’s new to the sport, and then introduces his cohost, Terry Simons, a renowned agility competitor who always seems to be on hand for these broadcasts. I assume he was chosen for his lean, craggy good looks, but despite this he’s not a natural on-air talent. For one thing, his voice is very thin and small; he tries to make up for it by SHOUTING ALL THE TIME, which only strains him to the breaking point. It’s a bit painful to hear. He’s also quite stiff with his commentary, relying excessively on a few set phrases like “THIS IS A TEAM WHO CAN TAKE IT ALL!” and you could base a college drinking game on how often he responds to a question with “ABSOLUTELY!” In addition, someone apparently told him that it’s important to smile when on camera, because he never once stops, and the effort takes its toll. By the end of the broadcast, his grin seems to have been fixed by rigor mortis.

  As for the rest of the show? Well, the entirety of the finals—in which fifty-seven dogs compete for five top honors (one for each jump height)—has been edited down to an hour; less, when you factor in commercials. So you get to see only a few complete runs, bumped up against each other so that there’s barely time to absorb one before the next is under way. Still, those are the lucky teams: pity those who are slighted by having their runs reduced to snippets of five or six seconds, then jammed together at the beginning of each segment with a voice-over intoning, “Here are the dogs who ran during the break,” as though we’re stupid enough to think we’re watching this live.

  This cut-to-the-bone approach can be unintentionally hilarious, as when Terry Simons talks to the winner of each division: in-depth interviews that last all of eleven seconds. Here’s the transcript of one of them, complete and verbatim:

  TERRY: I’M HERE WITH SUZANNE BIRD-SALL, OUR TWELVE-INCH WINNER TONIGHT! SUZANNE, YOU WERE HERE LAST YEAR BUT YOU DIDN’T MAKE IT TO THE FINALS! YOU’RE THE WINNER THIS YEAR! WHAT DID YOU DO TO CHANGE YOUR STYLE OF HANDLING OR TRAINING?

  SUZANNE: We’ve really worked on our lines, to get straighter lines and tighter turns.

  TERRY: WELL YOU DEFINITELY GOT STRAIGHTER LINES AND TIGHTER TURNS! CONGRATULATIONS! BACK TO YOU, BOB!

  Still, this is Animal Planet, so you forgive the kind of clunky production values that might annoy you anywhere else. And the sh
ow is not without interest. The courses are fiendishly difficult (they were designed by one Karen Paulukaitis, who on the evidence presented here could have a real career in organized sadism), and it’s shocking to see how just many of these dogs—the powerhouses, the elite, the top performers in the sport—drop bars, pop out of the weave poles too early, dive into the wrong end of the tunnel, and so on. And what’s remarkable is that, in many cases, I can see exactly what the handlers do wrong. I find myself saying aloud, “Oh, man, look where your butt is pointing!” or “Whoa, you were too late on that cross!”

  Periodically, throughout the hour, the show cuts away from the competition to little confessional vignettes featuring selected competitors. One of them—Melody Guiver, the handler of a five-year-old Bedlington terrier named Scout—says, “You need to be able to keep your cool. You can’t get stressed out. ’Cause you’re so excited, going up to the line, you know, you need to keep a level head, focus on what you need to do, and work every obstacle.”

  I feel a little jolt when she says this, as though I’ve been stung, or just sat down on a whoopee cushion. It’s like she’s talking directly to me. She may as well just turn to the camera and say, “And you there, sitting on your haunches in Chicago because things didn’t go your way, boo-goddamn-hoo, you can just get back up and try again. You hear me? Prima donna? Stop fiddling with the remote and listen. Yeah, I’m talkin’ to you.”

  Shaken, I go out on the deck and look down at dogs in the yard. The daylight is just starting to fade, but it’s been a sun-drenched afternoon and much of the season’s ice has melted; a little foretaste of spring to get us through the rest of winter. Carmen sits atop a lingering mound of dirty snow; she always seeks out the highest elevation, as though it confers on her some kind of exalted status. But Dusty is fence-running, barking and spinning, his legs and shanks caked with cold, wet grime. I call his name and he gives me one wild look and then goes off on another tear. All of the calm we’d achieved at Hounds seems to have dissipated with this sudden drought of activity.

  It occurs to me that I haven’t been giving him enough to do. He simmers with repressed energy until he gets outdoors and then erupts with manic energy. I’ve told myself he hasn’t missed agility—but how would I know that? Do I expect him to grab my car keys and run to the garage? Pull his ribbons off the shelf and start wearing them around the house, like the Order of the Garter?

  I summon him again, this time in tones he knows he’d better not ignore. He clatters up the steps and comes to a screeching halt in front of me, damn near leaving skid marks. He’s panting, smiling, filthy—there’s grit flecked all the way up to the tips of his ears—and gives me a look that says, “Quick, what is it? I’m busy!”

  I look into his eyes. He’s itchy, restless, unwilling to stand still beneath my scrutiny. “What is it you want, boy?” I ask.

  A moment later, I realize it’s not his answer I’m awaiting; it’s my own. I dismiss him with a wave and he disappears in a blur, spilling down the steps and back to the fence, where he once more explodes into his Tasmanian devil routine. I turn and go back inside the house.

  What is it you want, boy?

  There’s a leg of lamb in the oven, and the scent of garlic and rosemary suffuses the air. I begin trimming a pound of green beans, occasionally pausing to hitch up my jeans, which hang off my hips from all my recent swimming. As my knife stutters across the cutting board, I keep pace by chanting successive stanzas of Dante’s Paradiso in a low, steady rhythm. Life is full; life is good.

  But what is it you want?

  From the yard, a burst of staccato barking. Then the quiet roar of afternoon gives way to the burr of early evening—the seductive hiss of the possible.

  I want . . .

  I want to go back.

  CHAPTER 23

  Ifs, Andi, Buts

  All right, then. If I’m going to return to agility, I’ll need a fresh perspective—something to fan my newfound spark into a competitive flame. It occurs to me that I have an invaluable resource in my teammates. Each of them has his or her own particular history; each has a point of view as individual as my own. Hearing about their struggles and achievements can only inspire and reenergize me.

  I decide my best bet is Andi, possibly because she’s a lot like those breezy, brainy blonds who glide through Woody Allen movies. She has the same offhand air of self-confidence and speaks her mind so plainly, with an occasional barb of wit, that everything she says brims over with casual authority.

  I meet her for lunch at an Italian restaurant a block away from the medical center where she works as an information systems analyst. I drove here through a winter storm—the little hiccough of spring having given way to freezing rain, which turned to pelting snow as I dashed from my illegally parked car to the restaurant. Now, safe and warm inside, I’m pelted again, this time by self-doubt. Rather than reenergize me, Andi’s deflating me like a balloon.

  “Oh, I think dogs do have personalities,” she says in response to my opening gambit—a show-offy airing of my trusty “only persons can have personalities” sound byte, which usually goes over so well. “You’re just getting hung up on semantics,” she adds, as though excusing my folly. And of course, as soon as she says it, I realize that’s exactly what I’ve been doing. I’ve been a literalist, allowing the derivation of the word to drive its meaning, when in fact it has evolved beyond its origins, so that the thing it describes—the set of reflexes, impulses, traits, and responses that differentiate one individual from all others—is absolutely something dogs possess as well. Also cats and parrots and dolphins, and for all I know geckos and crawfish and supermodels.

  And I suddenly realize that that’s how I’ve been treating Dusty all along—how I’ve treated all my dogs, and everyone else’s too: as individuals, equals, personalities. While it’s true that Dusty exhibits many traits I associate with his breed, when I interact with him it’s not his Sheltieness that I engage with—it’s his Dusty-ness. Competing as a team enhances my appreciation of him and of the role he plays as my partner and as an athlete.

  Humbled, I toy with my eggplant ravioli. Andi is having a salad. How anyone can be satisfied with a bowl of chilly greens in the ferocious throes of an arctic squall is something I’ll never understand. But then, Andi’s salad is no mere romaine-and-bottled-dressing affair; it’s arugula and maché with mandarin orange segments, extra-virgin olive oil, balsamic vinegar, and, most tantalizingly, candied walnuts. One of which I end up asking to try. It’s delicious. Score another point for the distaff side.

  This is one of the reasons I connected with her early on. We do seem to share some demographics. We’re about the same age, both urban, both professional, and our cultural touchstones overlap. She, like me, clearly appreciates food that is actually food. She’s also a bit of an agility tourist, as I was until recently. In fact the sudden increase in my competitive activity with Dusty surprised her, and she says so. I try to explain the quest for glory, but it comes out sounding cliché and self-serving, not to mention plain silly in view of the dog on which I’m banking my hopes. True, Andi is one of Dusty’s biggest supporters and has always been gratifyingly observant of every corner I’ve turned with him. Unfortunately, it’s usually in the way you’d congratulate a teenager for getting past bed-wetting. The idea of Dusty as championship material is more of a conceptual leap than I can decently ask her to make.

  Still, she seems to understand that when I say “glory,” what I really mean is taking my relationship with Dusty to its highest level. Maybe once upon I time I thought that might mean ribbons, medals, MACHs, but really what I’m looking for now is just a validation of something I’m perfectly capable of recognizing all by myself: harmony, sympathy, congruity—translated into movement, grace, achievement—for me and my dog.

  Andi gets it. But then, her animal IQ is stratospheric. She’s had dogs since childhood. When I first met her several years ago she was training a lovely, sweet-souled golden retriever named Whisper. S
he retired Whisper just shy of competing in excellent, due to time constraints (Andi’s) and age issues (Whisper’s) but has compensated by giving her a new career as a therapy dog. Whisper works with very young children with developmental disabilities, and from what Andi tells me, with great success. In addition, she does pet visits in the pediatric unit, cheering up hospitalized children. “Though the parents get as much out of her as the kids,” Andi says. “Sometimes more.”

  One of Whisper’s current patients is a twelve-year-old autistic boy who looks like he’s in his late teens (he wears size-13 shoes). In just two months, he’s gone from having an almost primal fear of dogs to petting and stroking Whisper—amazing progress, and a testament to Whisper’s character. (What the hell, to her personality.)

  In the meantime, Andi has taken on another, younger golden, Kelly; this despite living in a 750-square-foot apartment. “The dogs take up about a third of it,” she says with a bemused shrug. “I guess I should be thankful it’s not more.”

  This is something else she and I share; we’re both on our second agility dogs. And like Dusty, Kelly isn’t quite as proficient as her illustrious predecessor. She’s goofier than Whisper, for one thing, and more easily distracted. She’s also shamelessly flirtatious. I’ve been jolted to attention more than once by her large head plunging amorously into my lap. “What can I say, she’s boy crazy,” Andi will apologize with a sigh. “When I walk her, she’ll start getting all wiggly and excited when she sees a man two blocks away. It’s embarrassing.” So much so that today, when I tell Andi my theory that Dusty’s various pathologies are amplified reflections of my own, she snorts and says, “I wonder what Kelly’s behavior says about me.” I have to laugh as well. The idea of cool-as-spearmint Andi as some kind of slurpy man chaser is beyond ridiculous. So, is that another of my pet theories shot down?

 

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