Shaper

by Jessie Haas

  10

  “NOW YOU SHAPE me.” David handed Chad the clicker.

  “Um, okay. What’s your reward? What does the click mean to you?”

  David looked at him again, as if he’d asked an unexpectedly brilliant question. “It means yes,” he said. “It means yes.”

  Yes? Yes? How did yes compare with pâté?

  But David was leaving the room. What should Chad have him do?

  Sit on the floor.

  David walked into the kitchen. The clicker clicked; he was gripping it too tightly. David stopped walking.

  Now what?

  David turned around. No click. He took a cautious step in each direction of the compass. No click. He raised his arms, held them out to the sides. How did people start to sit on the floor? Julia folded herself like a campstool, but was David that flexible?

  David bent one knee. Maybe. Click!

  Bend, straighten, bend, straighten. Click! Click! Click!

  Other knee. Click! Alternating knees. Click! Again and again. David had completely the wrong idea. Chad stopped clicking.

  David squirmed and grimaced. He walked off the spot where he’d been standing, and Chad wanted to say no, but he’d been told not to speak. When David stopped walking, Chad clicked again, staring at David’s knees.

  They bent a little. Click!

  A startled look crossed David’s face. He bent his knees again. Click! Deeper, Click! Deeper, Click! He was as deep as he could squat. Now what?

  One knee splayed toward the side. That might lead somewhere. Click!

  David looked puzzled. He splayed the knee out again, again, again. Chad clicked. He could feel the grimace on his own face. His eyes bored into David. Do it more!

  At last he spotted a tiny tilt in David’s body, as if he were starting to tip over. Click!

  David increased the tilt, click, more, click, more. He fell over on the floor and lay on his back. Chad could have screamed.

  Anyway, he was on the floor, so click. David just lay there for a minute. Then he struggled up, trying to squat again. Chad had missed the fleeting second when David’s rear was on the floor. Now he was squatting again, but tilting, tilting. Chad clicked him back onto the floor, and when David rolled up onto his rump, he clicked five times. “Yes!”

  David heaved a huge sigh. “Oh! Oh! Boy, this is hard!” He lay back, splaying his arms wide, and gazed up at the ceiling. The man who’d seemed permanently cool at the rest area was flushed and rumpled, and there was a smudge on the knee of his khaki pants. After a moment he said, “What we just did is dolphin training.”

  It was English as a second language! Words Chad thought he knew meant something else in this house.

  “You’ve seen those dolphin shows?” David asked. “Sea World, et cetera?” Chad nodded.

  “This is how it’s done. Think about it. You can’t put a swimming dolphin on a leash. You can’t yank it around. You can’t get at it to punish it. Trainers worked out this system of conditioned reinforcers—”

  “Um—”

  “Sorry. The conditioned reinforcer is the click. We teach the animal that click means ‘treat.’ Then we pair the click with a behavior we want. Jump through hoop equals click equals treat. That’s positive reinforcement.”

  “And that means—”

  “Do the right thing, get something good. It’s like a reward; only rewards come later. Reinforcement happens now, the instant the animal does the right thing. That’s why we use the click. You can’t stuff a fish in a dolphin’s mouth while it’s in midair, but you can say yes! and give the fish a few seconds later.”

  “Okay.” That did make sense.

  “The beauty of it is, the animal thinks it’s training you. You get better and more prompt at producing clicks and treats—from the animal’s point of view. It participates in its own training. You have a partner, not an adversary! ”

  “So, are you a dolphin trainer?”

  “I’m a dog trainer, but I’ve used this on Malkin and Rocky, too, and I’ve seen it done with birds, fish, llamas. You can even use it on caged zoo animals. It’s a new technology, and it’s going to change the world. Imagine! Someday most trainers, most teachers are going to focus on what’s going right! Yes! is what we’re going to say most often. Not no.”

  He got up and reached for the clicker. “Let’s do another round. This time you’re the animal.”

  Chad left the kitchen, as before. In the bare middle room he paused a moment, listening. There was no sound of movement anywhere in the house.

  He turned and made his entrance as an animal. He didn’t see Louise again that day.

  The next day they worked with Rocky. “He knows clicker work,” David said, “but he’s not great with strangers. Let’s shake up his expectations.”

  So they went down to the pasture and clicked Rocky into approaching Chad voluntarily. It took time; Rocky was suspicious, as befitted a former bucking bronco, and had a wide range of cynical, disgusted expressions. But with enough clicks, enough carrot coins, he allowed Chad to halter him, examine his large yellow front teeth, and even swab his neck with alcohol.

  “Alcohol comes before a shot,” David said. “If we can get him expecting a click instead, he might relax enough not to notice the needle.”

  Chad had a feeling Rocky didn’t miss much. Veterinarians probably smelled different from ordinary strangers. Still, it was interesting to click him into tolerance. He’d have enjoyed it more with Louise there to watch, but she didn’t come down.

  When he arrived the next morning, she was leaving the house. It was cool. Trees tossed their arms in the breeze. “Rain coming,” Chad said. Thank goodness! It gave him something to say. “Should you get an umbrella?”

  “We’ll play inside,” Louise said, and grinned at him. “Don’t look so confused! I have a play date with your little brother!”

  He has chicken pox. The thought came so clearly and quickly, Chad was afraid he’d said the words aloud.

  “I always wanted a little brother,” Louise said. “I don’t know why.”

  “Me either!”

  “Sky’s a great little kid! It’s a trade. You take Daddy off my hands for the morning, and I’ll play with Sky!”

  And I see you when? Chad wondered, watching her walk up the road. This was not what he’d meant to agree to when he’d taken the job.

  That day David shaped him again. The moment it began, Chad knew he preferred being the shaper. First he was supposed to walk, and then that wasn’t enough. He couldn’t get another click no matter where he went.

  Then he got one. “What’d I do? What’d I do?” He walked around the kitchen again, getting more and more annoyed, and suddenly another click.

  “I don’t get this!” Walk walk walk. Click!

  Walk. No click.

  “I’m doing it!” It was all right to talk, he decided. Blowing off steam was part of this animal’s behavior. “See! I’m walking!” He lifted his knees high in an exaggerated step. Click!

  “That’s it?” Knees high again. Click! But David wasn’t stopping him. He wasn’t there yet. Knees higher. Click! Higher. Click! He added a little bounce to his step and got a click, and “That’s it!” David made a scribble in his notebook.

  “Agh!” Chad moved his arms in a sort of violent stretch. “This stuff gets you mad!”

  David said, “In scientific jargon, you just experienced an extinction burst.”

  “A what?”

  “Extinction burst. Walking stopped working, but it had worked before, so you threw a burst of energy into it. The way you’d do to a soda machine that didn’t give you a soda. You’d press the button a whole lot harder.”

  “But why ‘extinction’?”

  “Behavior goes away if it’s not reinforced. We call that extinction. If I’d stopped clicking at all, you’d have quit. Right?”

  “That’s been the game so far!” Chad’s voice came out with an edge on it that embarrassed him.

  David said, “In ord
er to have something to shape, I need variety, different kinds of steps. I stopped clicking, waited for the burst—call it a tantrum!—and clicked you for that.”

  Chad let a smoldering breath out through his nostrils, hoping it was inaudible. “If you did that with a dog, you could get bitten.”

  David said, “If you were a dog, you’d have gotten a treat at every click, which helps. After your extinction burst you’d have gotten a jackpot, a huge, wonderful treat. So you’d be angry only momentarily, and then you’d be elated and trying to figure out what you’d just done. We’ve intellectualized it, postponed the treat, and you’re still mad. Aren’t you?”

  Chad shrugged. It was true. It was in his bones. They wanted to move and hit and shove.

  Red triangles flamed on David’s cheeks. He looked down; his hands were nervously pushing the cap on and off his pen. “You need to know about this stuff,” he said. “If somebody has what you want and all of a sudden the source dries up, that’s a power play! When your normal efforts don’t work anymore, you’ll jump through hoops for whoever’s withholding. Women—some women—are very good at this.”

  He’d had another call from Louise’s mother. Must have; it was the only thing Chad had ever seen upset him. What was she like?

  “It’s all done by withholding,” David said. “Withhold the click, and the dog tries harder. Withhold the attention, withhold the love … if it’s done right, it just tightens the net!”

  Chad didn’t know what to say. Nothing like what David was talking about had ever happened to him. He was too small a minnow to be worth anyone’s netting.

  “When this happens to you,” David said, “when, not if, ask yourself: Who’s withholding what? Where’s the hoop? When you know what’s being done to you, you can decide. Do you want to play the game or just … walk away?”

  Chad nodded. There was a space in the flow of David’s words, and it seemed a good place to nod, a good place to get up and head toward the door. “So,” he said, “Monday?”

  “Is it Friday already?” David asked. “Wait a minute, let me write you a check.”

  The amount was larger than Chad had been expecting. He was completely vague about the money side of this.

  “Thank you,” David said, handing him the check. “Actually I won’t need you Monday. This has been very helpful, but we need an animal in order to progress further, and the shelter wants to do a home visit and check my references before they let me have a dog.”

  “So … how long will that take?”

  “It may be two or three weeks. I’d have to let the dog settle in for a few days before we started.”

  Two or three weeks! That was forever. Louise would be practically gone by the time they got started again.

  With his hand on the doorknob he asked, “Does it have to be a special kind of dog?”

  “No. The dog my former wife has now—my former dog, I guess you’d call him—is a terrier. So not a terrier. Otherwise, I’ll just keep my eye open for a dog that appeals to me. The more ignorant, the better.”

  “Until you find one,” Chad said, “what about Queenie?” His voice sounded thin to him, reluctant. He hated saying Queenie’s name. But he’d hate not coming here even more.

  “Your family’s dog?” David put his head on one side, considering. “All right! Great! I’ll see you Monday.”

  CHAPTER

  11

  TWO DAYS OF family. Two days of Sky trailing around, moaning, “I want Lou-eeeeze! Where’s Lou-eeeeze?”

  Chad had already forgotten the length of those empty mornings before his job. Attach an empty morning to an empty afternoon, and that was eternity. Two eternities.

  In desperation he took his bike out, but there was noplace to go, noplace he wanted to go, anyway. Saturday afternoon he rode to the top of the hill outside town. The baseball game was going on, the pickup, adults and kids mixed together, all ages, free-for-all game that he’d loved last year. Among the tiny, distant figures he could pick out Phil, and Gordie McIver. And Jeep.

  He watched awhile. At this distance the ball was just a shimmer in the air. Was it caught, dropped, thrown to first base? He couldn’t tell. Going down closer was out of the question, though, and not just because of Jeep. What would Phil and Gordie say? He used to know—close enough, anyway. Now, beyond being pretty sure they wouldn’t ask him to play, he had no idea. Even wondering made him nervous.

  He pedaled back home, and couldn’t sit still, and couldn’t read, and couldn’t remember what he used to do last summer when he was happy. He took to the woodland trails again. At least there he didn’t meet anyone.

  Monday morning should have been better, but going down the road with Queenie, Chad missed Shep. Shep used to hunt along the stone walls, too, but it seemed that whenever Chad had glanced his way, Shep’s warm brown eyes would meet his. It wasn’t an Aunt V thing; he’d never wanted Shep to be more than a dog. But they’d said to each other with their eyes, “Isn’t this great?” This walk. This day.

  When he looked at Queenie, she didn’t look back.

  “Queenie,” he said. She glanced toward his voice. Her eyes were depthless, shiny as buttons.

  “David’s going to be amazed,” Chad said. “Bet he’s never met a dog as dumb as you!”

  David opened the door, and Queenie jumped up to lick his face. David turned his back, saying nothing, though her claws scrabbled across his ribs, and that had to hurt.

  Queenie dropped to all fours. Immediately David turned. “Hello, Queenie!” His voice sounded gentle and pleased.

  Queenie looked up with a surprised wag: Oh! Somebody’s home after all! David scratched her behind the ear.

  “And hello to you, Chad! Nice weekend?”

  “Do you want me to hang on to her?” Queenie was sniffing the bottom stair. She was house-trained—she’d house-trained herself, really—but she looked as if she might turn up her leg and pee on something any minute. She marked things that way outdoors, like a male dog.

  “There’s nothing she can harm. Come on into the living room. Something I want to show you before we start.”

  Queenie climbed the stairs instead of following. From an upper room Chad heard Louise’s surprised laughter. Was she in bed?

  The living room held a television/VCR, a couch, and one chair. David picked up a video and bounced it in his hand.

  “I’m what’s called a crossover trainer,” he said abruptly. “I used to train dogs the way you see little kids being trained in the grocery store—”

  Chad’s mind quoted Louise: I never go shopping with Daddy if I can help it!

  “—jerk. The mothers jerk on the kids’ arms; I jerked on the dogs’ necks. ‘Don’t do this, or this, or this, or this!’ A world of narrowing possibilities, till the dog hit on the one thing it could do to make me leave it alone.”

  He slid the video in and waved the remote. A title appeared on the screen. Before Chad could read it, David’s thumb on fast-forward tore the letters apart.

  A face next: David himself, younger. He held up his wrist with a choke collar around it and snapped the collar tight, speaking calmly to the camera.

  “I’m telling you how one hard jerk is kinder than lots of little timid ones,” David said, “how it doesn’t, really, hurt. Pardon me if I don’t turn the sound up!”

  The face on the screen went on speaking. David said, “Now I explain that we call it a leash pop, not a jerk, and it’s correction, not punishment.”

  David sounded sad and sour, but on the video he looked completely self-confident. He put the collar on a handsome boxer, demonstrating the proper position. Then he unexpectedly marched away. Caught unaware, the dog didn’t follow. Jerk!

  David took off again, again, again. Every time the dog seemed to be getting it, relaxing, David threw it a right-angle curve. Jerk! Jerk! Jerk! Jerk!

  Soon the boxer trotted at his side, one ear cocked for the slightest hint of a coming change of direction. The camera switched to David’s face.

&n
bsp; “Here I exult at having gained the dog’s attention.” David stopped the film, took it out of the machine, and stood looking at the black cartridge. “When I made this, Louise was eleven years old, and I knew everything in the world about dog training.”

  Louise … how come it took her so long to get dressed? Julia took 120 seconds from bed to doorway. But that was one of the few beauties of tie-dye; you never worried what went with what.

  “Two weeks after finishing this,” David said, “I went to a seminar and came away certain that I didn’t know anything, that I had to start all over again.”

  His thoughtful expression made Chad feel that he should say something, even if it sounded stupid. “Bummer?”

  “Should have been. My life broke in half, right then. But I didn’t know that. I was tremendously excited and relieved. I never had to do that to a dog again. I never had to say it was kind to jerk its head off.” He laughed, still sour. “Like hitting your head on a wall—it feels so good when you stop! Let’s work!”

  He led the way back to the kitchen, got out a package of hot dogs, and began breaking them into a bowl. “What do you want to teach this dog? It doesn’t really matter, so let’s pick something that’ll make her less annoying.”

  Chad shrugged. He felt as if there were an enormous gulf between them all of a sudden.

  “How about sit? Does she sit?”

  “Sometimes.”

  “Under what circumstances?”

  “If you yell. If you push her butt down.”

  “This will be different,” David said. “When she sits, she gets clicked. When she sits again, she gets clicked again. It’s totally up to her how often she gets a piece of hot dog.”

  “But she’s supposed to sit when we say, right?”

  “That’s the goal. Can we start there?”

  Chad felt the deep itch of impatience along his bones. He was supposed to answer a certain way. He wanted not to. He always hated the feeling of being herded toward something.

  But he was being paid, not forced, and any minute now Louise might come down. She should find him saying something interesting.

  “I guess not. I guess we’ve got to move the ball down the field first.”