Paws before dying

by Conant, Susan

  I took a deep breath, blew it out, turned off the flashlight, and clambered over the wall ahead of Rowdy, who cleared it in one bound. Just as he landed, a clap of thunder rolled and a summer torrent let loose as if his agile leap had shaken the earth and ripped open the sky. No lights showed on the first floor of Jack Engleman’s house, but a bright glow radiated from the second story on the side facing the driveway and the Johnsons’ house.

  “Rowdy, this way,” I called softly as I took a few wet steps along the edge of the pavement and tugged on his lead. “This Way.”

  The water, I thought. He’d always hated it. The first baths I’d forced on him had been battles of will, and, even now, he’d howl when I scrubbed his underbelly. I’d seen him go swimming only once, when Kimi had accidentally knocked him off the dock and into the pond at Owls Head. He’d immediately rushed out, shaken himself off, and spent the next ten minutes tearing wildly around in indignant protest. But this was nothing, a shallow puddle, and, after all, he wasn’t afraid of water. He simply loathed it.

  “Rowdy, this way,” I repeated insistently, and was about to call him to heel when my conscience pricked me. I remembered the First Commandment of the late St. Milo Pearsall, founder of modern obedience methods: Thou shalt listen to thy Dog and see things from His point of view.

  “What is it?” I tried to sound faithful. Even if he’d been tracking the scent through the woods, hadn’t the downpour washed it away? Or was it something he could hear? Or simply the familiarity of Jack Engleman’s house, the memory that we’d been here before? Like all good sled dogs, he always preferred the known trail to the unknown and balked whenever I wanted us to detour instead of retrace our steps. “Go on,” I told him, anyway.

  He pranced happily across the street, avoided a puddle under the streetlamp in front of Jack’s house, and headed confidently down the driveway. Like the dutiful golden retriever I was born to be, I followed at the end of the leash. That Friday night, I thought. Rose and Caprice went to the tennis courts. No dog trainer himself, Jack stayed home. Home alone? Home at all? Had anyone asked? I hadn’t. The question had never even occurred to me.

  The blacktop ended at a two-car garage. Its doors were closed, but Rowdy had no interest in them. He circled knowingly to the side of the building, where a large plastic trash barrel had been knocked over, its cover pried off, its contents strewn around. For the second that I trusted Rowdy, I was afraid to look. Then my self-confidence returned and, with it, the chagrined realization that his only practiced tracking skill was a keen nose for—oh, God, yes—food. The flashlight, turned quickly on and off, showed the shredded remains of a white plastic trash bag and numerous bits of crumpled aluminum foil that stank of what smelled like Camembert but may only have been overripe Brie. Through thunder and rain, my noble lead dog had guided us swiftly and safely along the track of the last raccoon that had raided Jack Engleman’s garbage.

  Rowdy buried his nose in a large sheet of foil. His paws held it securely on the ground while his tongue scoured off every last globule of rancid butterfat.

  “Drop it,” I said firmly.

  He’d been trained to give his dumbbell on command, but obedience dumbbells aren’t coated with cheese. He ignored me. I knew I could pin him, force my fingers in back of his molars, and wedge his jaw open. I considered hauling him away by force. The Alaskan malamute is not a giant breed. I outweighed him by all of thirty pounds, and he was probably a mere ten or twenty times as strong as I was. He wasn’t even wearing a training collar. Between crashes of thunder, I listened to his tongue persistently lap the foil. Rain was hitting the trash barrels in loud pops, and water gushed noisily down a spout on the side of the garage.

  Leah and Kimi. Leah and Kimi. And he was feasting on cheese.

  I must have cast my eyes upward in search of heavenly inspiration, but the help I found, if you can call it help, was entirely mundane. The windows of Jack’s house, as I may have mentioned, were designed to look exotically and quaintly baronial. Except for the leaded-glass trim by the door, the windows in the front of the house were metal casements with dozens of tiny clear panes, and at the back of the house, in the remodeled kitchen where Jack and I had studied the blurred example of Rose’s incompetent photography, large sheets of plate glass alternated with French doors.

  The three illuminated windows on the second floor, though, the ones that faced the Johnsons’ yard, were like giant versions of the small leaded-glass panels in front. Although there were lights on inside, I couldn’t see into the house through the elaborate patterns of yellow, orange, green, and blue that were, I suppose, meant to suggest the stained glass in the private chapel of some small chateau. One of the windows stood slightly open, like a door propped ajar, but all I could see through the bright rectangle was a patch of wallpaper. The windows, then, were easements, like the ones on the front of the house. They opened. Rose had stood at one of these to take that blurred photograph.

  It might well have been snapped from behind a closed window, but through a pane of clear glass, not through this yellow, orange, green, and blue. The snapshot’s colors had been natural, obviously unfiltered. To take the picture, Rose had stood by one of those windows, all right. But the window had been open to give her and her camera an unimpeded view out. Her subject had had an equally good view in. Anyone in greater Boston who read The Globe or The Herald or who watched the local news or listened to the radio—in other words, almost everyone— knew about the man who went to jail because his smart, effective neighbor did something more than report abuse. That neighbor took pictures of the man beating his dog. In all the reports, that was the point of the story: The man got locked up because the neighbor had solid evidence.

  “Rowdy, drop it!” I ordered him, and this time, he heard me. I was born a golden, but lately I’d crossed the breed boundary and become at least half malamute. “Drop it!” I whispered. That’s supposed to be the way to get someone to listen, isn’t it? With dogs, it’s worth a try. So are speed and surprise. I stomped on the piece of foil, lunged for it, and snatched it up and out of his reach. Then I crushed it in my left hand, buried it in my closed fist, and held it flat against my waist, which is a permissible place to put your left hand when you’re heeling a dog in the obedience ring. “Rowdy, heel!” I said softly. In training, of course, what’s in your fist is liver, cheese, or IAMS dry cat food, but the ball of foil worked fine. Rowdy swung to my left side and, in spite of the wet ground, sat nicely, with his front feet even and his eyes fixed on my face. “Good boy,” I said. Thou shalt never, ever forget to praise thy Dog.

  I stepped off on my left foot, then switched to an AKC regulation fast pace that took us to the Johnsons’ front door in about ten seconds. Except for a low-wattage flood somewhere at the end of their driveway and a pale glow from a cellar window, the house looked completely dark. I rested my entire palm on all of the buttons of the plastic speaker box by the front door and then pounded on the door. Somewhere inside, a dog barked-Rowdy growled a low reply. Then the rain, which had let up a little, began pouring down, and the thunder started up again-My pounding on the door sounded like rattling-metal imitation thunder in a poorly produced radio play, but I wasn’t sure that anyone inside could tell it from the real thing. I leaned on the buttons again. The dog’s barking was closer this time, much closer. The speaker crackled. I heard nervous, high-pitched breathing. Edna.

  “Open up!” I ordered her calmly and firmly. Over the years, I’ve had a little practice in issuing orders, but I suppose that welcoming visitors was a trick she hadn’t mastered yet.

  “Let me in,” I said as if I expected her to do it.

  That didn’t work, either. As an obedience prospect, Edna Johnson rated somewhere below poor, but that’s probably one of the nicest things anyone’s ever said about her. The dog barked again, and I expected Rowdy to roar back and scrape at the door, but something else caught his attention. Hitting the end of his leash, he almost caught me off balance, but I held on and ran after
him.

  “Easy,” I said, nearly falling on the slippery lawn. “Rowdy, wait.”

  “Leah!” I shouted over the thunder. “Kimi! Leah, yell! Where are you? Leah!” But the dog inside was still barking, and the renewed rain had brought with it a strong wind that rattled loose objects unidentifiable in the dark and blew through the hundreds of Norway maples that line every street in Newton. “Leah! Leah, where are you?”

  But I knew she couldn’t hear me. Or could she? Was she answering me? It was useless. I heard nothing but the dog and the storm. I tossed the slimy ball of foil into the air, grabbed Rowdy’s leash with both hands, and held on.

  Then I tripped on something and hit the soggy lawn hard. The fall knocked the wind out of my chest and buried my face in the muddy unmown grass, but I kept my hold on Rowdy’s leash and brought him to a halt. The damned rope. I’d forgotten it. Kaiser was kept here sometimes, tied up where he could bark and growl only a few yards from Jack’s backyard. I stood up and wiped my hands on my drenched jeans. Rowdy started off again at a slow trot. Following him had now yielded me one bag of garbage and one bad fall.

  He pulled me to the back of the Johnsons’ house, where the r°ugh, pitted blacktop ended at the closed, windowless doors to a basement garage, but also widened into a small parking lot that held a white delivery van and a mud-colored American sedan. The pale floodlight I’d noticed before was mounted above the doors.

  More rotten cheese, I thought; another stop on this ludicrous trash-barrel odyssey. Here, though, were no garbage pails, no torn plastic bags, no scraps of foil, no bits of rotten cheese. The rain had turned to an even mist that hung in the air. Thunder rolled. Suddenly, sheet lightning caught the billions of tiny droplets in the air around Rowdy, who took a couple of quick steps to one of the garage doors and began raking the rough wood with his right forepaw and whining at me. The two-car garage had two sets of old-fashioned double doors, the ones that pull out instead of swinging up overhead. I grabbed a handle on the door that Rowdy was scraping and pulled hard, but it didn’t budge. He kept whining at me. I stopped yanking and pressed my ear against the door. Deep, angry male voices rumbled distantly. Leah screamed.

  Chapter 27

  THE car or the van would have broken down the garage doors, but both vehicles were locked. My frantic search for keys stashed in those little magnetic metal boxes revealed none. Rowdy was impatient, whinnying at me and tugging at his leash. The damned leash was strong, but it was a standard six-foot training lead, way too short. Besides, although he’d pull willingly enough with the leash snapped to his collar, the harder he pulled, the more the collar would press against his throat. To harness his real power, I needed just that—a harness—but his was hanging on a hook on the inside of my kitchen door.

  My sore ribs reminded me of Kaiser’s rope. Was it tied to a tree? I had no knife. I retrieved the flashlight from the blacktop by the garage doors, hauled Rowdy across the lawn, and nearly tripped on the rope a second time. I picked it up, pulled *n both directions, and began gathering it up. At the dog’s end was a metal snap. The other end was tied not to a tree, but to a sturdy metal tethering device, a corkscrew stake. I unscrewed it from the wet earth, and Rowdy and I headed back to the light.

  The end of the rope fastened to the corkscrew stake had to go around the door handle; otherwise its sharp spiral could injure Rowdy. The harness I fashioned for him from the snap end of the rope was nothing to brag about. A good harness is made of webbing, not rope. It’s padded. Mine wasn’t. It’s designed for its purpose: It’s an X-back sledding harness, a racing harness, a trail harness, or a freight and weight-pull harness. My arm was to approximate any harness at all, and the result was rough in design and rough on Rowdy’s breastbone, withers, and forelegs, I’m afraid, but if it worked at all, he’d feel those ropes cutting into his flesh for only a few seconds before the garage door yielded. Or the handle tumbled to the ground. Or the old wet rope broke. Even when new, it had been more like clothesline than like any rock climber’s special, and the combination of Kaiser’s lunging and exposure to the elements had obviously weakened it. It was knotted in a couple of places and, in others, beginning to fray.

  I knotted the corkscrew-stake end around the sturdier-looking of the garage-door handles, and at the opposite end of the rope, about fifteen feet from the door, positioned my rope-trussed Rowdy to face away from the garage. I got behind him and gripped the slimy rope in both hands. I wouldn’t be much help, but I intended to do my share.

  The rain was still drifting down in a fine mist, but the thunder and lightning had stopped, and the wind had entirely abated. Ahead of me, Rowdy’s wet coat reflected the weak floodlight. Drenched and shed out, he was a bony, ragged creature who looked more like an unkempt wolf than like a malamute. Rain had transformed the plumy white of his tail to limp clumps and spikes. Mud coated his feet and clung to his legs and belly. My hope rested on this skinny gray dog.

  “Rowdy, pull!” I shouted suddenly, before I lost my nerve. “Pull!” My voice sounded weak.

  When he moved forward, the rope dug and bit into my palms, but the door didn’t give.

  “Whoa,” I said.

  I breathed out, and Rowdy stopped. He shook himself off and spattered me with water and mud. The heaviest weight he’d ever pulled before was a light sled with smooth, fast runners designed to glide across snow. He’d never been harnessed to a dead weight, never been asked to haul a loaded sledge, never been told to strain. And he’d never known failure. Until now. But the rope hadn’t broken. I renewed my grip on it.

  The words that I whispered to Rowdy were the words Jack London gave to Thornton, the words Thornton whispered to the great dog Buck. “As you love me,” I whispered. I raised my voice, repeated the words, and added my own: “As you love me. As I love you, Rowdy.” Then I shouted: “PULL! ROWDY, PULL! PULL, BOY! PULL!“

  Head lowered, forelegs bent, crouching as if to flatten himself to the ground, Rowdy gave a single mighty lunge that shot the rope through my hands and burned off skin. His great hind legs struggled, his massive forelegs reached, every muscle of his body drove indomitably forward.

  The handle and the frayed rope held, and so did my dog, heaving and straining. With a sudden crack, the big door gave. I had to stop Rowdy before he yanked it from its hinges. What I’d asked him to do had been beyond his strength, and he’d done it, anyway. His muscles didn’t force open that door. What did it was sheer will, the will to pull. It’s called heart, you know. Great heart. I sank to the wet blacktop and tried to cradle him in my arms, but he just licked my face and wagged his tail. Born to pull.

  With Rowdy roped to the door and nothing to use as a knife, I entered the dark garage. The angry male voices still rumbled not far away. I snapped on the flashlight. Ahead was a door. God help me if this is locked, too, I thought, but the knob turned easily in my sore, tom hand. I turned around and ran the beam over Mitch, Jr.’s, Corvette, a big lime-green station wagon, a battered lawn mower, a new snowblower, and a collection of rusty garden tools, including a pair of hand-held grass shears. Back outside, I used their dull blades to saw Rowdy loose from that makeshift harness. When I’d freed him, I called him to heel and returned to the garage, to that unlocked door. I eased it open a crack and held still. Rowdy sat silently at my side. I peered in and listened.

  The basement room must have been renovated in the fifties. Some long-ago do-it-yourselfer had stuck acoustic-tile squares on the ceiling and installed recessed lights. The tiles were water-stained. Some of the light fixtures dangled loose. The walls and a flight of stairs directly ahead of me, at the far end of the room, Were roughly finished in cheap knotty-pine paneling. The furniture, all painted a loud, hideous orange, consisted of some hanged-up kitchen chairs and a great many low tables that looked like discards from an unsavory cocktail lounge. The room also held a long, lumpy-looking couch and two matching chairs, all upholstered in some disgusting, furry black stuff that looked like home-dyed, overprocessed human hair.
r />   Leah sat upright and immobile in the middle of the couch. Her arms were folded across her chest. So far as I could tell, she was unhurt. I couldn’t see Kimi. Willie Johnson had one of the human-hair chairs, and the eldest brother, the Corvette-driving, would-be suave Mitch, faced Willie from one of the orange kitchen chairs. Dale was pacing back and forth taking swigs from a can of Miller Light. One of his hands held the beer can. In the other was a black cylinder. He was shouting at his brothers, who were both shouting back at him.

  Of the three louts, Mitch had the most penetrating voice and the clearest articulation. I caught his gist pretty quickly.

  “One goddamned stupid mistake of yours after another,” he hollered, jabbing a finger toward Dale. The jacket of a dark suit hung over the back of his chair, his white shirt was sweat-stained, and he’d undone the knot of his red power tie. “Every damned thing you’ve ever done you’ve screwed up. And then when you screw it up, and somebody comes in and tries to unscrew it for you, do you help? Hell, no. No, not you. You don’t need anybody’s help, do you? Well, this time, I’ve had it. Let your loudmouth friends get you out of this one.” He leaned back and fiddled with his tie.

  Dale crumbled his beer can in his fist, threw it against the wall, and bellowed what I took to be a defense of his loudmouth friends. After Mitch, Jr., had given him a reply that was mostly about his Corvette, his college degree, and the upward path that stretched before him in spite of Dale’s efforts to drag him and the rest of the family down, the two of them started in on their father.

  “So go wake the old man,” Mitch sneered. He stood up and immediately sat down.