by Susan Conant
"No. Not really. No. But I don't want him eating it, anyway. Crazy people do go around poisoning dogs, you know."
"You're hedging."
"I'm not. It happens. It happened at a show in the Midwest not all that long ago, to a malamute. He was poisoned at a show. Storm Kloud's Better Than Ever. He was called Luke. He was one of the top-rated malamutes in the country, and he was poisoned. He died."
"That's horrible."
"Of course it's horrible. I cried when I heard about it. I sent a check. There's a fund, the Luke Fund, to give a reward for information about who poisoned him. You see, it does happen. It really could happen here."
Rita shrugged. "This isn't a dog show."
"All the world's a dog show."
"And all the men and women merely terriers, malamutes, dachshunds . . . ."
"Enough," I said. "Look, can you tell me one thing? When you saw Donna Zalewski, did she mention dogs?"
Rita shook her head at me.
"How much did she know about dogs? Could she have let Kimi run loose? Could Kimi have got into some kind of trouble?"
"Holly."
"All right. It's just that Kimi is not the best-behaved dog in the world. She's young. She's still half puppy. I've wondered if she might've done something, got someone furious, someone who didn't understand dogs. Someone who got some kind of pathological hatred for her. Yeah, okay. I guess I can find out for myself."
8
When the four of us had returned home and Rita was in her kitchen making coffee, I waited in her living room and checked the Rolodex next to the phone on her desk. I knew that in addition to the phone numbers of her friends, she kept the phone numbers of her patients there in case she got sick or we had a blizzard and she needed to cancel her appointments. Not just phone numbers, it turned out. Addresses, too. Donna Zalewski had lived on Lakeview Avenue. Rita, forgive me. I had to know.
The next morning, I put a metal training collar and a sturdy webbed leash on Kimi and walked her toward what had once been home for her. Lakeview is closer to Fresh Pond than is Appleton Street. The Brattle Street ends of Appleton and Lakeview are inhabited by elderly professors with inherited money and by youthful celebrities, doctors, lawyers, and business people whose social aspirations have taken an intellectual turn. Most of the houses are tall, wide colonials and even taller and wider Victorians with fanciful turrets and room-size wisteria arbors. The opposite ends of Appleton and Lakeview, the ends on my side of Huron Avenue, must originally have provided walk-to-work housing for the Brattle and off-Brattle live-out help, but these days those humbler dwellings, triple-deckers and styleless twenty-room arks, are considered just as intellectual as the Brattle-end mansions but politically correct as well, even after an architect has transformed them. In other words, the neighbors are not just doctors, lawyers, professors, and therapists, but writers, teachers, plumbers, electricians, and cops.
Donna Zalewski had lived in a nondescript brown-shingled house in the transition zone, barely on the Brattle Street side of Lakeview, just beyond Huron Avenue. The house had a front lawn, or what the winter had left of one, and a cream-colored porch with three mailboxes and no milk box, at least that I could see. There might be one at the back door, I realized, or it could have been removed after Donna's death, if she'd ever had one at all. Kimi briefly lifted her leg on the trunk of a maple in front of the house, but didn't give any sign of recognizing the neighborhood.
"Nice dog," said a burly young guy walking by. "What kind is he?"
"She. A malamute."
"Thought he was some kind of husky."
"She's all malamute," I said.
"Big guy."
"Yes, she is," I said. "She weighs about seventy-five pounds."
"Big feller," he said.
Perhaps I should add that in addition to looking big and strong, Kimi looked feminine. She was not what's known as a doggy bitch. I wouldn't have dared to use that phrase in front of Elaine Walsh. (There are also bitchy dogs, but that probably doesn't even the score.) Anyway, when the guy started to pat Kimi's head, she dropped smartly to the damp concrete sidewalk, rolled onto her back, tucked in her paws, and looked up at him, pleading for a tummy rub. I was happy to see her do it. The alternative was jumping on people, which she'd done a few times. But this dope, who, of course, didn't understand anything about malamutes, stood there looking at her with an embarrassed expression on his face. Obviously, he also had the opportunity to observe that she was a bitch, but it didn't seem to sink in.
"Take it easy, big guy," he said.
When he'd gone on his way, I spent another couple of seconds looking at Donna's house and then walked Kimi toward Brattle. Near Donna's was a house I'd noticed before while walking Rowdy, an ordinary box-shaped brick house with an extraordinary array of plants and stones in front, where you'd expect a lawn. There were six or eight small pink quartz boulders, dozens of upright slabs of granite and slate, and what appeared to be a collection of deformed miniature evergreens and twisted, grotesquely stunted deciduous trees that had dropped their leaves and looked as if they'd died painfully. Standing there staring at it, I felt like the ghouls who slow down for glimpses of gore at the scene of a highway accident. I was so taken that I ignored Kimi, who was pawing and sniffing at the low wall of rough stones around the garden, if you can call it that, until she treated me like a sled frozen in the ice, almost tearing my left arm out of its socket and nearly throwing me to the ground and hauling me up the street toward her goal, two Rhodesian Ridgebacks and, incidentally, at least from Kimi's perspective, Kelly Baker, who'd once told me that she walked those dogs a minimum of six miles a day.
Then Kimi hit the ground. If you're ever walking a malamute and find that at the sight of other dogs, she suddenly drops to the sidewalk, don't assume that she's spontaneously put herself on an obedient long down. There's nothing one-down about that immobile, catlike pose. In wolves, it's called an ambush. Crouched flat, she's preparing to spring at her prey, and if you aren't careful, she'll take you along. I should add that Kimi's ambush posture was like those mock jabs to the stomach that human male jocks use to greet one another, not an announcement of a serious wish to start a fight with the Ridgebacks, Nip and Tuck. Kelly, who probably recognized the ritual display for what it was and, in any case, knew that I could handle a dog, didn't panic the way some fools do when an essentially gentle, friendly creature like Kimi is only pretending to be ferocious. And I can handle a big dog, of course. You have to relax every muscle in your body and keep all your joints flexed, especially your hips, knees, ankles, shoulders, elbows, and wrists. In other words, adopt the stance of a Japanese wrestler, and hang on to the leash with both hands. It worked, and Elaine Walsh would have been proud of me because I didn't look at all ladylike. Kimi didn't even come close to wresting the leash from my hands, and she didn't drag me an inch toward the Ridgebacks.
"Now, behave yourself," I told her as I hauled in the lead and stared directly into her eyes. "No more of that. Be a good girl."
Rhodesian Ridgebacks are big, handsome dogs with short, sleek coats. The breed ranges in color from a light fawn to a reddish wheaten. The Ridgeback people will probably hate me for this, because no other breed really resembles the Ridgeback, but if you've never seen one, imagine a very small fawn-colored Great Dane, maybe sixty-five or seventy-five pounds, with uncropped ears. The ridge? That's what's unique. Along the backbone of a Ridgeback, a narrow strip of fur grows in the direction opposite to the rest of the coat. Above the shoulders, the ridge makes two swirls—crowns, they're called—that are supposed to be perfectly symmetrical, as they were on Nip and Tuck, who were an identical glossy wheaten red. Nip was the dog; Tuck, the bitch.
"I'll be damned," Kelly greeted me. Flanked by her big dogs, she looked even shorter than she was, and, offering an ever-welcome instance of Winter's rule (that dogs and their owners look nothing alike), had short, very curly, very feminine black hair, like an untrimmed poodle's. "That's Kimi, isn't it?"
&n
bsp; I gave Kimi a bit of leash, then all six feet, and the three dogs nosed and smelled each other. Whenever I'd seen Kelly with the Ridgebacks, Tuck, the bitch, had been on leash. Although Nip usually wandered with them off leash, he never seemed to stray far. Today he checked out Kimi's scent, circled around the two bitches, and then devoted himself to a rapt examination of the olfactory history other dogs had inscribed at the base of a nearby maple. When the canine introductions were over, Kimi turned her attention to Kelly, but since I suspected that Kimi would soon start sniffing somewhere that even a dog lover wouldn't appreciate, I hauled her toward me again.
"Yeah, this is Kimi all right," I said. "You know her?"
"Sure. I haven't seen her for a while, but I thought that's who she was. She's a lot bigger now. You want some advice?"
Dog people are always handing out free advice. They'll tell you what breed of dog you want, where to buy him, what to feed him, how to groom, train, and handle him, what judges to show him under, and what to wear yourself when you do. I expected to be told to trade Kimi in for a Ridgeback, or to add canned squash to her dog food, or to use a pinch collar on her, but Kelly surprised me.
"If I were you, I'd keep her away from that rock garden," Kelly said. "You probably noticed it."
"Rock garden. So that's what it's called," I said. We both grinned. "It's really bizarre."
"Joel calls it the garden of death." She smiled. "He has some elaborate theory about the symbolism, how it represents a cemetery. The rocks are all gravestones. And the plants are bodies. And skeletons."
"I guess I can see that. There is something sinister about it."
"Anyhow," Kelly said, "the woman just slaves over it. Misguidedly, but she does. And the big problem seems to be that she uses a lot of manure, and it attracts dogs. So, of course, they leave their scent, and that attracts other dogs, and the whole thing escalates."
"Dog heaven."
"Exactly. Anyway, she loathes dogs, and it's remotely possible that she'd remember Kimi. She won't do anything worse than come out and scream at you, but she can be pretty unpleasant."
"What did Kimi do?"
"Got loose a couple of times and started digging."
"And got caught."
"And got caught. And the woman was off the wall about it. Maybe she wouldn't recognize Kimi, anyway, though. She probably thinks all dogs look alike. And Kimi's grown."
"Who is she? The woman."
"Someone with a black thumb who hates dogs. Actually, her name is Green, ironically enough. Anyway, it's her own fault. She's the one who spreads the manure. And she's been told about that, that she ought to switch to something else, but she won't listen."
"Did you know Kimi's first owner?" I didn't mention that I was the third, not the second.
"No," Kelly said. "I mean, I knew what she looked like. That's all."
Kelly thereby proved herself a real dog person, I concluded. She'd remembered Kimi's name and probably never even bothered to find out the name of her owner.
"You knew she died?" I said.
"Really? She was young."
"Yes." There was a moment of silence, as if we were paying respects.
"So what are you up to these days?" Kelly was obviously asking what was going on with my dogs.
"Rowdy and I are training for Open. Kimi's getting a course on basic civilization, and then we'll see."
"That was a good column on submissive urination," she said.
"Thanks," I said. "Actually, I could use your help with one I'm working on now. I was thinking of something about Ridgebacks in obedience. One of the things I like to do is encourage people to get a bigger variety of breeds in obedience."
"So it doesn't look like a breed ring for goldens."
"Right," I said. The American Kennel Club started awarding the O.T.Ch. title, Obedience Trial Champion, in 1977. The first three O.T.Ch. dogs were all golden retrievers. You also see a lot of shelties, Rottweilers, German shepherds, and poodles in obedience, not only because there are a lot of them but because they're good obedience dogs. But you don't see many Ridgebacks in obedience mainly because you don't see many of them anywhere. It's not a common breed. "You got a C.D. with a Ridgeback, didn't you?" I asked Kelly.
"Zing. We co-owned him. And I'm working with these two now. We don't train with Cambridge," she said apologetically.
That's where I train, Cambridge Dog Training Club.
"That's okay." I smiled. "Would you talk to me about it sometime?"
"Sure. You free this afternoon?"
The Bakers' architect-redesigned house at the Fresh Pond end of Lakeview was, like Elaine Walsh's house, a pale yellow, one of the hues made fashionable by the Brattle Street residents who paint their Victorian and colonial mansions—or, should I say, have them painted—in oddly attractive shades of mauve-brown or off-lavender or nonstandard yellow. The Bakers' yellow was creamier than Elaine's, paler and warmer, and they'd succeeded in making the house look both cozy and stylish, outside and inside.
The kitchen had a granite island in the middle, cherry counters with marble splash boards, and a restaurant-size gas range. The counters held a Cuisinart, blue pottery pots filled with metal ladles and wooden spoons, a fully loaded, oversize knife-storage block, and one of those mechanical orange squeezers that cost three times as much as the electric ones, not to mention a four-slice toaster and a Kitchen-Aid appliance big enough to serve as a concrete mixer. You could have cooled my entire kitchen in the built-in refrigerator from which Kelly removed a bottle of milk. Held by a magnet to the refrigerator door was a sheaf of papers on a metal clip. A matching sheaf of papers hung from the door of what must have been a nearly walk-in freezer. The papers showed neatly printed lists of the contents of the refrigerator and freezer, by category. Under the heading "Baked Goods" on the freezer's list were ladyfingers, madeleines, baguettes, genoise, croissants, and some other things with French names that I didn't recognize, and with each item was a notation of an amount and a date. Some of the amounts had been changed, and some items had been crossed out. Three quarts of fish stock remained of the original six in the freezer. The Bakers were down to only a dozen eggs in the refrigerator.
"I cook," Kelly said. "Not professionally. It's a hobby."
Her blue-flowered pinafore could have passed as an unusually pretty apron designed for a TV chef with a tendency to spill everything all over herself. She had the clear, smooth, translucent skin and bright pink cheeks you see on people who work in bakeries, but her complexion was probably attributable to daily marathon dog-walking.
"It looks like more than a hobby," I said.
"I half wish it were. It would give me something to say when people ask what I do." She grimaced.
"You get a lot of that?"
"In Cambridge? Are you kidding? Try explaining that you have a traditional marriage around here, and what you see on people's lips is one word, and that's victim."
She probably didn't realize that it is, in fact, possible to make coffee without grinding the beans yourself. When I asked where the chocolate croissants had come from, she said that actually they were petits pains au chocolat, not croissants—they weren't shaped like crescents—and confessed that she'd made them. I ate four, including the crumbs, which were buttery flakes, not crumbs.
I wanted to ask her whether her husband had ever talked about Donna Zalewski, what had gone wrong between them, what the rumor about him was that Rita wouldn't pass on, whether she'd known that Kimi's owner had been her husband's patient, and a lot of other things, but I was distracted. Besides, the questions would have been tricky to slip in with the ones I had to ask about Rhodesian Ridgebacks.
"These two are young," she said. "We finished Nip last summer, and we just finished Tuck in December. Joel handles her. He has less time than I do."
Finishing a dog may sound like ending him—another one of those horrible euphemisms—but it means something good: getting a championship in breed, which requires accumulating points at AKC shows. You
need fifteen points won under a minimum of three different judges and at least two majors, which are three-, four-, or five-point wins. Championship points go to Winner's Dog and Winner's Bitch (although for some reason I've never understood, the AKC always omits the apostrophes), and . . . And if you don't already know the rest, don't ask.
"Congratulations," I said, and added, referring to Tuck, who, with Nip, was asleep on the floor, "Are you planning to become parents?"
Tuck was a beautiful bitch who'd completed her championship. Kelly was a real dog person. She knew that I was, too. For all I knew, the Bakers had five children. Anyone would have assumed that the Bakers were thinking about breeding Tuck, and Kelly should have assumed that that's what I meant. She didn't. She almost choked on her petit pain. Her face fell, and her eyes teared up.
"Kelly, I'm so sorry. Look, I meant Tuck. I meant four-legged parents. I'm so sorry. I'd never have—"
She interrupted me. "Please. Of course. I've gotten hypersensitive about it. Damn. I hear it in anything. It wasn't you. Naturally you meant Tuck. This fertility problem has been so awful. It's such a struggle. And you're right. We are planning to become four-legged parents, we hope."
When she pulled a tissue from one of the patch pockets on the front of the pinafore, I realized that it wasn't so much an all-encompassing apron as it was a maternity dress.
"Hell," she said. "Let's talk about dogs."
We talked about Pearsall, which isn't some rare dog breed, but the last name of Milo and Margaret, who revolutionized American dog training. Their book is subtitled "Obedience from the Dog's Point of View," and if dogs got to pick their handlers' training systems, we'd probably all use nothing but Pearsall. I don't think that all of the Pearsalls' step-by-step procedures and all of their barriers, gadgets, and gimmicks are necessary for a smart dog, but I love their attitude. Kelly Baker, though, was a Pearsall fanatic. We talked for a long time.
Joel walked in just as I was finally leaving. He gave me a warm smile, kissed Kelly, and heard about my proposed column on Ridgebacks. I liked him and wondered why Donna Zalewski hadn't. He was only about five five, but next to Kelly, who couldn't have been more than five one, he looked tall. Although by the standards of my rural Maine background, his blond hair was too well cut, his face too smoothly shaven, and his mouth too close to pretty, he could certainly be considered an attractive man. I remembered something I'd read in that feminist book Elaine Walsh had given me, something about men feeling most like men when women are clearly and unambiguously women, and I wondered whether that was what had attracted Joel to Kelly. As the book suggested, maybe her petite femininity made him feel masculine, and maybe he felt most like a man when he was out working and she was home in that wonderful kitchen. Elaine Walsh had told me that all marriage is slavery, but that wasn't the feeling I had about the Bakers' marriage, which I knew must have been tried by the fertility problem. I felt even worse than I had before about my blunder.