The Dogfather

by Conant, Susan

  “And he don’t do nothing I say. Like take Frey. You tell him sit, he sits. But Anthony? Well, you saw what he’s like.”

  “Goal three: basic obedience. Except,” I said, “I, uh, had the impression that you didn’t particularly care about that.”

  “Well, Anthony is small,” Carla said. “It’s not like if he jumps on people, he knocks them over. And about what happened at Joey’s funeral, it’s not like Anthony goes to funerals all the time.”

  “We have a saying in dog training: If it’s not a problem for you, it’s not a problem. Anthony is your dog, and if you don’t care whether he sits, why bother teaching him?” Carla stirred her coffee and licked the foam off her spoon. At the lowest volume I’d heard her use, she said, Enzio don’t like it.”

  I bought time as she had. The coffee was wonderful. The froth was... well, frothy. As for Carla, she was young enough to be Enzio Guarini’s granddaughter. “Mr. Guarini likes a well-behaved dog. That’s true. Well, okay, we have our goals.”

  The phone rang. Carla excused herself to answer it. She listened and scribbled, then repeated the order to the caller: floral blanket to cover a casket, six vases of gladiolas, and a wreath of rosebuds. “The blanket’s going to be super,” she said. “You’ll love it. For a friend of Mr. Guarini’s, I’ll do something real special.” She then placed a phone call to order flowers. Hanging up, she said, “You ready for Anthony?”

  I said yes. I was ready, too. I like a challenge. And I’d come prepared. While Carla got Anthony, I emptied my tote bag of its contents: a size small citronella anti-bark collar, a clicker, a leash, a container of thin-sliced roast beef, a packet of my homemade liver treats, and a copy of The Irrepressible Toy Dog by Darlene Arden.

  Anthony entered the shop between Carla’s breasts. Despite the cozy traveling spot, he was screaming. Carla was screaming back at him.

  “Put him down.” I pointed to the floor in the middle of the shop.

  The look in Carla’s eye was fearful.

  “I won’t hurt him!” I hollered. Kneeling next to the little monster, I snapped on the leash, fastened the citronella collar around his neck, and stepped away. These collars are painless alternatives to bark-activated shock collars: The dog’s barking makes the collar emit a harmless spray of citronella. Alas, some dogs don’t mind citronella. Some actually like it. Luckily, Anthony hated it. The very first squirt startled him into silence. “Good boy!” I spoke calmly and gave him a minuscule bit of liver.

  “This is a useful tool,” I told Carla, “but all by itself, it won’t perform miracles.” After explaining how the collar worked, I got her to praise and reinforce Anthony for silence. Anthony’s expression was comical, at once astounded and relieved.

  “See how happy Anthony looks,” I observed. “He knows he’s a lucky dog to have someone who loves him enough to train him.”

  Having given Carla the crucial experience of being able to influence the dog’s behavior, I moved swiftly to the proper use of the clicker. I had Carla click and treat ten times. By the tenth click, Anthony had the idea: He looked eagerly at her in expectation of a morsel of food.

  “Both of you are doing great,” I said. Moving far faster than I’d normally have done, I questioned Carla about Anthony, learned that he’d supposedly been taught to sit, and coached her through clicking and treating him for doing it. In the purist version of clicker training, I’d have waited for him to sit on his own, I’d have clicked and treated each time, and I wouldn’t have spoken the word sit for a long time. I’m not a purist. But I got results. Then we stopped. “Always end a session on a note of success,” I said.

  Carla removed the citronella collar and returned Anthony to her car. Over second cups of cappuccino, we went over some basics of dog training: “No free lunch,” I said. “If he’s barking, he doesn’t get anything he wants. Don’t feed him, don’t touch him, don’t speak to him, and do not pick him up. Anthony has to earn everything.” Then I gave her the book about toy dogs and instructed her about introducing Anthony to the crate. She was to leave the crate door open and encourage Anthony to explore the interior by putting toys and little treats inside. “Remember to keep the training session short,” I said. “Short and happy.”

  “This is so nice of you!” Carla screamed.

  My eyes drifted to the tiny citronella collar, which lay on the counter. Truly, there’s a market for a human version. Still, I left the shop with a sense of satisfaction. Luckily, Anthony had responded to the collar, and so far, he hadn’t figured out the trick of rapidly yap-yap-yapping to empty the collar of its citronella supply, thus rendering it useless. Carla had gained a sense of control over Anthony. She was highly motivated: She wanted the shop to succeed, and, surprisingly, she had what struck me as a romantic interest in pleasing Enzio Guarini. Even the shop had benefitted: Citronella smelled better than floral air freshener.

  Oh, one last thing. The flowers Carla had ordered arrived just before I left. When she insisted on giving me a spray of delphiniums, my resolve weakened. I love delphiniums. And I really had done her a favor.

  Damn it all.

  CHAPTER 17

  It took me a long time to drive from Carla’s nonfloral flower shop in Munford to my house in Cambridge because as usual my car staged a malamute-worthy display of disobedience. When I halted at a red light in Arlington, it stalled and then the engine flooded. As always happened on clear, dry days like that one, the windshield wipers went on whenever I signaled for a turn. The backfiring made pedestrians run for cover. Agents Deitz and Mazolla were probably too busy tailing real mobsters to follow a mere Mob-associate dog trainer like me, but I couldn’t help wishing I’d catch sight of them: If the horrible Bronco quit completely, maybe I could dream up a tidbit of inside-Mafia information to trade for a ride home. After what felt like hours of annoyance and embarrassment, I eventually pulled into my driveway, got out, slammed the door, and kicked the nearly treadless front tire.

  “ ‘Something there is that doesn’t love a—’ ” proclaimed a quintessentially Cantabrigian voice. Robert Frost. He had lived only a few blocks from my house. Not that Frost was now speaking from the grave. The words were his, but the speaker was the female, although somewhat androgynous, owner of Kimi’s attacker, the dust mop with teeth.

  Finishing the quote, I said, “A wall would be a more effective means of transportation than this so-called car.”

  “She being not brand-new,” the woman said. The allusion was to another Cambridge poet, e. e. cummings. In spite of the mild spring weather, the dust mop’s owner wore a British-looking tweed jacket and skirt. On her feet were polar fleece socks and Birkenstock sandals. This time, the dust mop was not on the retractable leash that had given her the freedom to attack Kimi, but on a short leash.

  “You will observe,” said the woman, “that Elizabeth Cady’s Flexi privileges have been revoked. She proffers her profuse apologies.”

  “Her apologies are accepted,” I said.

  “Ta-ta! Off we go, E. C.!” With that, she led Elizabeth Cady away.

  I gave the Bronco another kick, went into the house, hugged the dogs, sat down at the kitchen table, pounded my fist on it, and burst into tears. Then I washed my face, made coffee, and called Leah. “My damn car is shot,” I told her.

  “No kidding.”

  “Leah, it’s not fit to drive.”

  “There are holes in the floor. It backfires. It refuses to start. It stalls. The gauges don’t work, and neither does the radio. For starters.”

  “Leah, no, it’s worse than that. This isn’t just the usual. I drove it today and barely made it back home. I know I promised to help you move Rita’s old love seat tonight, but I just can’t. I’m sorry, but if we try, we’re probably going to get stuck in the middle of the Square with a dead car and a couch. I really don’t dare to drive it.”

  “Anyone else would’ve dumped it a year ago.”

  “Well, I guess anyone else would’ve had the money to replace it.”

>   “What are you going to do?”

  “Walk. Damn it! The one good thing about this car was that I owned it. I cannot afford car payments. But I don’t have much choice. I’m really sorry about the love seat, but it just won’t fit in Rita’s car.”

  “It’ll fit in Steve’s van. Easily.”

  “Leah, I don’t like to—”

  “I like to. I will. I’ll call you back.”

  Leah hung up. Five minutes later, the phone rang again. Leah announced that all our problems were solved, by which she meant that that she and her roommates wouldn’t have to wait to get the attractive and fairly new love seat Rita had offered her. Leah had interrupted Steve at his clinic and taken advantage of his obliging character by persuading him not only to let her use his van, but to help us move the love seat. In connection with Steve, the very word bothered me. Love seat. Why couldn’t Rita have discarded a piece of furniture with a loveless name?

  “There is no need to impose on Steve,” I told Leah. “Your friends can help, and—”

  “Steve doesn’t mind. He volunteered. And he’s bringing Sammy. My friends want to meet the puppy. Everyones’s going to get to your house around seven.”

  Rita rapped on my door at six-thirty.

  I greeted her by saying, “Leah is being high-handed and bossy about this love seat.”

  “She’s doing me a favor. The new one is being delivered tomorrow, and if Leah wasn’t going to take this one, I’d have to have it hauled off.”

  Rita is the sort of person who moves furniture by getting someone else to do it. She’s perfectly fit. As is appropriate for a psychologist, the impediment is strictly mental. Well, it’s also pedal, so to speak. Or podiatric? How can anyone who calls herself a feminist possibly wear high heels? That’s what I asked Rita.

  “To make sure I always have defensive weapons handy.” She kicked off her suede pumps, took a seat at my kitchen table, and poured each of us a glass of merlot from the bottle she’d brought. “And now you’re going to tell me that I could perfectly well learn to groom Willie myself and therefore should.”

  Willie is Rita’s Scottish terrier. Theirs is a perfect match. They’re stylish, high-maintenance creatures. Also, Rita spends her working hours trying to change her clients’ behavior and refuses to come home and make the same effort with her dog. Willie, for his part, is almost untrainable—that’s my opinion, anyway.

  “No, what I’m going to tell you,” I said, “is that I’ve finally given up on my car. Every mechanic I’ve taken it to in the past year has told me that I need to dump it. This morning, I realized that they’ve all been right. The thing has become outright dangerous.”

  Rita is sensitive to the difference in our incomes: She didn’t ask why I hadn’t replaced my car years ago.

  I said, “It’s a good thing I like walking. The second half of the advance on my liver book isn’t here yet. Not that it’ll buy me a new car. Meanwhile, here’s Leah commandeering Steve and his van, and it’s humiliating to have him know that I can’t afford—”

  Rita almost never interrupts. “Stop it! As if Steve cares what you drive. Or how much money you make.”

  Rita knows me so well that I don’t have to bother explaining abrupt transitions. “Rita, how could he have married that horrible woman?”

  “You’ve read The Odyssey. Remember Circe? She turned men into swine. Steve did what a million other men’ve done. You rejected him, and he fell under Anita’s thrall.”

  “Sssshh! He’s here.”

  Steve and Sammy the Baby Rowdy entered the kitchen trailed by my cousin and three other undergraduates, a woman and two men whom Leah must have chosen for their brawn. Leah is not only practical but polite. She introduced everyone to everyone else. Then, to Sammy’s delight and to the grinning Steve’s as well, she and her friends sat in a puppy-centered circle on the floor and fussed over Sammy, handed him around, and let him untie shoelaces and scramble from lap to lap. The young woman was African-American with braided hair as black as Leah’s was red-gold. One of the young men was Eurasian, the other almost comically Yankee looking, raw boned, big footed, and lantern jawed. Together, the four students and Sammy could’ve been posing for a photo intended to illustrate the universality of dog love. Steve and Rita shared my pleasure in the beauty of the scene; all three of us smiled knowingly. For me, there was the added joy of glimpsing Rowdy as I’d never seen him. Our lives had intersected when he was a young adult; I’d never known him as a puppy. Now I could.

  Beauty is never more fleeting than in the case of a puppy too young to be reliably housebroken. When Sammy began to sniff and circle, Steve scooped him up and took him out, and then all of us turned to the task of moving the love seat from Rita’s apartment to Steve’s van.

  My house, I remind you, is at the corner of Appleton and Concord. The driveway is on Appleton Street. It’s wide enough for two cars and easily accommodates two more behind the first two. When I’d driven the ailing Bronco home earlier that day, two cars had already been there, side by side, Rita’s new BMW and my third-floor tenants’ second car, a Honda sedan. I’d parked behind Rita’s car. Steve’s van was now in back of the Honda. Since moving the love seat didn’t require all of us, Rita and I decided to switch cars while Leah and her friends went upstairs to get the love seat and while Steve crated Sammy in his van. The point of trading parking places with Rita was that my expiring Bronco belonged in a spot where it wasn’t blocking another car and where it could just sit until I got rid of it. After a couple of noisy attempts, I got it started, pulled out of the driveway, backed a little way down Appleton, and watched as Rita backed out and drove forward on Appleton to wait for me to take her place. That’s when the Bronco quit. And not quietly, either. Imagine the painfully amplified roaring of diseased intestines. Steve’s soon-to-be ex-wife, I might mention irrelevantly, drove a silver sports car, and not the kind that made racetrack vrooms, but the kind that made no sound at all. To Anita’s discredit, her car had no room for dogs because she really hated them, whereas my Bronco had lots of space for big dogs and had transported them for thousands of miles. In fact, there’s no doubt in my mind that Rowdy and Kimi were involuntarily responsible for its demise because every formerly moving part was now clogged with malamute undercoat. So, right in the middle of Appleton Street, the luckless vehicle died of dog hair.

  By this time, the love seat was in the van. Rita’s idea of moving broken cars is to call AAA, but everyone else helped to push the Bronco to the space on the street just beyond my driveway. To minimize the duration of my embarrassment, I insisted on leaving the Bronco there instead of trying to push it into the driveway. Steve, Sammy, Leah, her three friends, and the love seat departed. Rita went upstairs to her apartment. I ate dinner, puttered, checked my e-mail, took the dogs for a short walk, and went to bed early. Rowdy and Kimi slept on the bed. At three o’clock in the morning, both dogs were still dozing on the comforter. Almost nothing ever bothered them. Thunder didn’t scare them, and they were used to the Bronco’s habitual rumbling and backfiring. Regrettably, I am only half malamute. At three A.M. a thunderous BOOM not only jolted me awake, but terrified me. When I threw on jeans, a sweatshirt, and running shoes, the dogs finally got interested. They tagged after me as I dashed to the cellar, where everything there was normal. Neither the hot water heater nor the oil burner had exploded. But as I discovered when I finally looked outdoors, something of mine had blown up.

  My Bronco.

  I had good insurance. The car was worth more dead than alive. And it was now definitely dead.

  CHAPTER 18

  After running to the cellar to make sure that the house wasn’t on the verge of petrochemical detonation, I left the dogs indoors and sprinted outside, where I nearly collided with Kevin Dennehy. When the boom had jolted me awake, I’d experienced what I suspect is the almost universal impulse to react to unidentified blasts, roars, and smells of smoke by focusing on dangers affecting my loved ones and my own property. But asleep or awa
ke, Kevin was all cop. Awakened by the same thunderous bang, Kevin had assumed that its source was an external threat, against which it was his duty to protect not only his mother, his house, and himself, but all the rest of us, too, including, if need be, the City of Cambridge, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, and the entire United States of America. In brief, by the time I’d finished investigating my cellar, Kevin had already gone outdoors, found the smoldering wreck of my car, and summoned what he casually called “backup.”

  The minute I opened the back door, the stench hit me, and my own outside lights and the streetlights let me catch a glimpse of smoke coming from my car. Kevin refused to let me near it. I protested.

  “You could’ve been in it,” he said.

  “In the middle of the night? Kevin, really. It’s my car. I want to see what happened to it.”

  “It blew up.”

  “Kevin, I can smell what happened. I want to see it. Where was it?”

  “On the street. And the first thing I want to know—”

  “I know where I parked my car. Where in the car was the explosion?”

  “Where?”

  “What part of it?”

  “The car part of it. The vehicle.”

  The wail of a fire truck drowned me out. It was the first of three. Kevin had also summoned many of his brothers in blue and, for no reason at all, an ambulance and, ridiculously, I thought at first, a truck that appeared to be hauling a cement mixer. I soon abandoned the fantasy that the spontaneous combustion of dog hair had delivered the coup de grace to my car. Malamute undercoat had killed a succession of my vacuum cleaners. When my stove had broken, the repairman had removed its top to reveal an inch-thick layer of fluff. But dog hair, even powerful malamute hair, was innocent of this destruction. As the reality hit me, I was frightened. Learning that the apparent cement mixer belonged to the bomb squad, I was glad to have the contraption there. I also felt grateful that Kevin had the clout to muster a massive amount of official help. An ordinary citizen might’ve screamed at the 911 operator to send every cop, firefighter, and EMT in the city; Kevin actually succeeded in jamming our narrow street with an amazing number of emergency vehicles and a slew of wonderfully calm, capable emergency professionals.