by Kim Kavin
“Oh, is that who you’re waitin’ on?” the waitress said. “I know her. That’s just Annie. You could be waiting here for hours.”
When Turner finally arrived, I warmly accepted her big, bear hug. She didn’t even say hello. She just walked right up to me with outstretched arms and a broad smile, as if I were her longlost friend. She is an attractive woman, perhaps my age or a few years older, who looks like she might have been a popular cheerleader back in the day. We sat down and ordered from the dinner menu, and I took out my notebook. While we noshed on appetizers, I asked Turner to tell me a little about herself and about how she’d become involved in rescuing dogs like Blue.
Turner was born and raised in Person County. Once upon a time, she said, she worked in a job that let her take care of people who needed all kinds of help. She told me that she liked the job well enough and figured she’d do it forever, but then one day, when she was twenty-five years old, her then-husband hit her square in the face. His punch broke her nose, which was shoved so far back into her head that it created a blood clot in her brain.
She told me that she was blind for a while and lost her depth perception, but her normal vision returned enough that she can once again drive. She still can’t walk along the railroad tracks— she gets dizzy and falls off the ties—but all in all, she figures it could have been worse. She is remarried now and lives off her disability payments, which gives her plenty of time to do rescue work with dogs. While I found her speech and thought patterns a bit jumpy as we moved from topic to topic, her heart remains big and generous, especially to pooches in distress. From the time she was a child, she says, she was always one to get yelled at for bringing home too many strays.
Two or three times during our conversation, when I asked her about her dealings with Ron Shaw and Person County Animal Control, she avoided details but said Shaw has learned not to mess with her over the years. Several times when I asked her for specifics, she referred to the fact that she’s much shorter than he is and said, simply, “Dynamite comes in small packages.”
She told me that she thinks Canine Volunteer Rescue was founded around 1975 because she’s seen a banner celebrating a former president, and that date is written next to the lady’s name. Turner has been with the group since about 1990, which is at least seven years before Shaw took over as director. She says the facility has had problems for as long as she can recall, and that she remembers having to go at one point to the county’s Board of Commissioners to even be let inside to see the dogs.
It all seemed logical enough to me, based on everything I’d learned so far, but something about Turner’s demeanor left me feeling as though I might not be asking all of the right questions. I couldn’t tell what it was for sure, but after years of interviewing people for stories of all kinds, I had a feeling that something was missing.
After we finished dinner, I did what I’d planned to do all along—asked Turner to walk with me to the parking lot and surprised her with a forty-four-pound bag of dog food. It was the biggest one I’d been able to find back home. I figured Blue couldn’t possibly have eaten that much during his short stay with her as a puppy. I wanted to repay her, and then some, for providing him a safe place of refuge.
I then asked Turner if I could visit her home, something I knew was forward but that I felt I had to ask. I wanted to learn more about where Blue had lived. It’s a truly bold request, I know, asking a woman you’ve just met to take you back to her house for a look around. I would have understood if she’d said no, but she could tell by the look in my eyes that I really wanted her to say yes.
Turner hesitated and thought it over before agreeing, and then she told me I could follow her home. She next pointed to her vehicle across the parking lot, and I guess the look of surprise on my face made her feel like she had to provide an explanation. She said she’d recently inherited the luxury truck. It was an interesting sight as the $70,000 vehicle worked its way along the streets of town.
I followed diligently behind, driving right past the animal shelter on Chub Lake Road and then beyond along the beautiful country roads that make this part of North Carolina a place where people want to stay long after they’re old enough to leave. After turning down a few side streets and passing a charming white general store, I was parked in Turner’s driveway. She vanished for a moment and then reemerged in a golf cart, where she asked me to sit beside her so she could drive me down to the house next door.
That’s where she was living when she brought Blue home, and she said that she still owns the property today. It was not at all the farm that I had imagined when I’d heard that word over the telephone, with open fields and crops growing and maybe some hay bales stacked in a barn. Instead, it’s a regular house—the kind that can be found in plenty of neighborhoods all across America. A good-sized yard is around back and off to the right, surrounded by a chain-link fence. “That’s where Blue used to play, with a clear view of the pond,” she told me as a pair of dogs ran barking toward us. She told me they were her dogs, even though she now lived one house over, up the hill. They seemed desperate to get to her for attention, the way Blue does when I come home after being away for even a half hour, but Turner barely even acknowledged them. Nor did she stop the golf cart to get out and go say hello to them. About the same time, I heard barking out behind the vacant house near the pond and asked if those were her dogs as well. “Oh yes,” she said. “There’s some more babies out there, too.”
We continued our golf cart tour by riding around to the left side of the house, which abuts an overgrown field. This, she said, is where she used to take Blue for walks. She must have once again noticed my quizzical look, because without my even asking she felt the need to explain how Blue might have walked through what I was seeing—a stretch of land overgrown with grass nearly as high as my belly and weeds as far as the eye could see. “I kept this all mowed when I lived here,” she told me. “He never did like to pee in that field, though. He liked to go over to the fence on the other side of the house and pee on that while the other dogs were still inside. You know, like he was saying, ‘Ha ha, I’m special. I got out.’”
I turned my head to look back at the fence, and instead saw what looked like a swap meet at best, and a junkyard at worst. A covered area toward the back of the house was littered with old four-wheelers, tools, and various other parts and machines. My first thought was that if this was an area where Blue had ever stepped foot, then he probably needed a tetanus shot. And again, my expression gave me away. Before I even asked about the rusted and wrecked machinery, Turner said, “My son can fix anything. He can take any of those things apart and turn them into something else.”
Next, she drove me in the golf cart around the back of the property and the pond, heading up the hill to the house next door, where she now lives. We stopped to pick a few grapes from her bush—they were so tasty and sweet that I felt like I got an ice cream headache—and as we sat there in the golf cart discussing the merits of fresh fruit, I saw two dogs run up the road in the distance, right into the vacant house’s yard.
“Yeah, they’re my neighbor’s dogs,” she told me. “He has fifteen acres, and he says he doesn’t believe in fences. Or neutering. Those dogs have knocked up the Cocker Spaniel up the road about four times now. I got the lady with the Cocker Spaniel the vouchers for the twenty-dollar fix, but she keeps telling me that she forgot to go cash them in at the mobile vet. Whatever.”
Our tour continued up over the hill behind Turner’s current house, where I heard more barking than I’d heard inside the Person County Animal Control kennel. The golf cart struggled to make it up and over the crest on the dirt path, and once we were there, we got out to walk. I saw at least three large kennels plus a fully fenced-in area, with at least a dozen more dogs yipping and yapping to get our attention. I had never seen so many dogs in one place, except in the kennel I had visited earlier that week. It seemed like an awful lot of dogs for one person to take care of, even with help from a friend or
two. Some of the dogs were puppies who had been outside in these pens for at least the hour or two since she’d left to meet me at the restaurant—and Turner didn’t even open the gates to go inside or acknowledge most of them. They yipped and barked and clawed at the fencing, trying desperately to break through.
My first instinct was to go to the dogs and play with them, but Turner quickly dissuaded me of that notion. Some, she said, I could pet. Others, she told me, would bite. One dog, who had white fur with the potential to be gorgeous, had so much brown gunk running down from her eyes that I wanted to get a tissue and clean her up myself.
“Now, Blue would never have been out here,” Turner told me. She noticed the way I was looking at the white dog, and then she rubbed at the dog’s eyes with her own thumb before continuing. “He was way too little and sick. He had the ringworm—oh, did he have the ringworm somethin’ fierce—so I had to keep him away from the other dogs. He stayed crated in the house. I have some dogs inside in crates now. I can show you in the house how it would have been.”
As we made our way back up the driveway toward her home, I felt incredibly uneasy. This was not at all what I’d imagined when she told me by telephone that Blue had lived on a farm. This is not what I’d had in mind when she said he played with lots of other dogs, so much so that at least one really missed him. Those claims, to me, suddenly sounded the way the packaging does on “free-range” chicken that comes from places where the birds aren’t technically in cages, but never actually see the light of day.
I thought carefully how to ask my next question. I wasn’t sure how she would react, and I didn’t want to be rude.
“Is there a point,” I said slowly and deliberately, “at which the county or the state says you have too many dogs to take care of by yourself? Might they, for instance, want to qualify you as a kennel? Or maybe, I guess, are there laws about hoarding?”
She didn’t look at me, and she didn’t seem upset, but she answered in a snap. “Oh I looked into that,” she said. “I made a call. You aren’t a hoarder unless they can find sixty dogs. Believe me, honey, I’m under the limit.
“Now,” she continued as we stepped out of the golf cart and onto her front porch, “housekeeping is not my specialty.” I nodded and smiled politely, thinking that it’s not exactly my specialty, either. I figured I’d see dust on the tables, an unmade bed, and maybe some dishes that needed washing in the sink as I followed her inside the house to learn more about how Blue had lived.
I’d barely made it three feet inside when I stopped to get my bearings. As with all of the dogs outside in the pens, I was now seeing something inside that I’d never before encountered. This wasn’t a messy house the way I understand that phrase. This was a house where a path had been cleared across the floor to get to the various rooms and then back outside.
We entered through the front door and were immediately in what appeared to be the living room—which I say because I saw parts of two black sofas. They were covered in so much debris that there was barely anyplace to sit. To my left, where some people might have placed a coatrack, huge bags of dog food were stacked about waist high. Junk seemed to be littering most of the floor on the right side of the room, as well. I couldn’t make out exactly what was in the short and tall piles all around, but I’m pretty sure I saw various combinations of old newspapers, boxes, clothes, and the like. The table between the sofas was covered with what looked like bits of packing Styrofoam peanuts, which someone had strangely organized into color-coded piles of pink and green.
We walked into what I took for a spare bedroom, and Turner flipped on the lights. I counted seven crates. Only one was empty. The dogs barked crazily, like the ones who don’t get walked down at the shelter. As with the dogs outside, Turner left all but one in the crates and didn’t even acknowledge their presence. One of them was a big, brown boy who could barely stand up straight, his crate was so small. The crates looked clean to me, but I noticed the floor peeling up in sections beneath them.
“Are all of these dogs currently available for adoption?” I asked.
“Well, most of them are,” she said. “Some of them are mine. Some of them aren’t ready yet. The ones that can’t find homes, now, this is going to sound terrible, but they have to live with me forever.”
She smiled as she said it, like she was telling a joke.
Then she flipped off the lights, led me back past the crates of barking dogs, and shut the door unceremoniously behind us.
Next came the kitchen, where I heard more barking than in the spare bedroom. The door to the kitchen had a glass pane in the center that was covered long-ways by a beach towel so that nobody could see inside. “Let me just go through there, and you can see them from outside,” Turner said, leaving me alone in the living room. She walked into the kitchen and closed the door behind her, as if there were something inside that she needed to rearrange before I could see it. I waited a few seconds and then pulled the towel over with one finger to sneak a peek. I counted at least a half dozen small dogs, maybe more. A lot of them appeared to be Chihuahuas. Then I quickly let the towel snap back, feeling guilty to have looked at all.
Once we were both back outside, she let me look through a glass door not only into the kitchen, but also at the adjoining room’s windows, which had been painted black. They looked like the windows at strip clubs, completely slathered in darkness to ensure that nobody sees what’s happening inside. She told me that was her post-op room and that more dogs were inside, healing from whatever ailed them. The phrase “post-op” startled me. I immediately wondered who, precisely, was doing what kind of operating.
I also wondered, as I stood there, how many of the dogs hidden behind those blackened windows had been “treated” with bleach just like Blue. I wondered what else was being done to them. I wondered how many of them would eventually get to leave, if ever.
Unsure of what else to say or do, I thanked Turner again for having helped to get Blue out of the shelter. I told her that I appreciated all she had done to help save his life. I got into my car and turned the key. I prepared to head from Turner’s house back down the road that leads to the local shelter, and then to my hotel.
I drove in stunned silence, wondering how my boy had ever made it out of Person County alive.
A Cool Breeze in Hell
The next morning, after a night of precious little and entirely disturbed sleep, I got an early start and drove about three hours south of Person County. My destination was Robeson County, whose animal-control facility has received a lot more publicity in recent years than the one where Blue was found. While Person County Animal Control has quietly plodded along in something of a public-awareness vacuum, Robeson County Animal Shelter has been like a murder suspect sitting in a police station with bright lights shined directly into his eyes. Advocates told me that things there had been even worse than the situation that Blue faced, and that somehow, under the glare of harsh public outcry, the shelter had found a way to turn things around.
I wanted to know what Robeson County had done to bring change, since it certainly didn’t involve throwing money at the problem. The median household income is $28,202. Nearly 30 percent of the residents live below the poverty line. Robeson holds the unfortunate distinction of being the absolute poorest county in the entire state of North Carolina.
I drove into the town of St. Pauls by way of NC-20, a two-lane road that seems at least one lane too big for anything that might even remotely be considered rush-hour traffic. Mine was one of the only cars in motion along the flat, paved stretch, which cut through swaths of tall, proud trees climbing from beneath blankets of healthy, green grass. The scenery that nature had created here looked as soft and welcoming as any state park under a crisp blue sky. Where it had been cleared for structures built by man, though, things looked hard gained and worse kept, even in the morning’s best and brightest light.
The names of the side streets are a lot like the people I would soon meet in Robeson County: They t
ell it like it is, in plain language that everybody can understand. Two of the streets I passed were called Grassy Road and Bumpy Road. A bit farther up the main road, a little ways beyond the vacant storefronts and across from Bo’s Food Store, was the only place I saw with a full parking lot and any kind of hustle. A good number of people walked through the front door, right under the white banner with big red letters announcing that a “Summer Sale” was on at the Family Dollar.
Somewhere in this vicinity is where the county’s animal shelter used to be, according to Timothy Mason, who has been with the program for the past eighteen years. As recently as about 2000, he told me, the shelter was housed in the old office of a veterinarian. I heard him debate with a coworker whether the old office had a dirt floor, or a floor so dirty that it could no longer be cleaned, but either way, the place was scary nasty. It’s where he used to go to work every day.
Today, Mason walks with the kind of wise elder’s gait that tells you there’s no reason to be in a hurry, because in life, change isn’t coming anytime soon, anyway. As he told me the story of his job as it used to be, he shifted uneasily on both of his feet. He moved around the room a little, too, as if his own words made him feel uncomfortable in whatever space he chose to stand.
“They’d bring the dogs in,” he recalls. “There were always so many dogs, but we only had ten pens. We couldn’t tell what was what, there were so many dogs in each cage. Once a week, the city would send a dump truck. Now, this wasn’t a pickup truck. This was a big, tall dump truck. We’d get each dog with a catch pole and give it a heart stick4 to kill it. I didn’t want to do it that way, but they were going to take my job away if I didn’t.”