“All right! Did I say there wasn’t a problem? There’s a problem.”
"And all I did, Rita, was to do exactly what any other reasonable, contemporary dog trainer would’ve done. Modern methods. No pain, no discomfort, no force. Lock him up in a safe place for a short time, and—”
“Holly, at the risk of repeating myself, I do not like to see dogs in cages, and, furthermore, this high-handed—”
“Fine,” I said. “We’ll have it your way, then. You don’t like positive methods? Great. There are plenty of others, and Willie’s your dog.” I switched to my most obsequious salesperson voice. “Now what would you prefer, madam? I don’t happen to have any shock collars in stock right now, but I can certainly order one for you, or... Let’s check what’s on hand. I’ll be right back.”
I dashed to my study, rummaged around in the boxes Beryl had sent, and hustled back to the kitchen with a dog-silencing device in each hand. In my absence, Rita had taken her usual seat at the table. At first glance, I was tempted to hope that the move signaled the beginning of a return to the comfort of our friendship. Then I realized that I had caught Rita’s habit of overpsychologizing everything. Rita sat down only because her feet hurt. Moral: If you intend to stand your ground, don’t wear high heels.
“Here,” I announced, raising my left hand, “is your simple old low-tech no-bark, no-bite Velcro-fastened muzzle. Just clamp Willie’s jaws together, slap it on, and there you go! No noise. Or not much, anyway. Of course, he won’t be able to eat or drink anything while he’s got it on, and he’ll probably manage to claw it off before long, and it won’t teach him a thing, but, hey, no cage!” I tossed the muzzle on the table, then held up the little red plastic box in my right hand. “So now we move on to high tech, namely, the automatic bark-activated Yap Zapper with optional manual operation at a simple touch of this button.” I pointed the device straight at Rita and pressed. The Yap Zapper made an almost inaudible click, and its tiny red light flashed off and on. “And there you go! You can’t hear it, I can’t hear it, but any dog within—”
Rita sat straight up, grabbed for her ears, and exclaimed, “What was that?”
As I’ve said, from the human standpoint, or at least from my human standpoint, the Yap Zapper had done practically nothing. The click was as soft as the tap of a fingernail, and you had to look at the gadget to notice the little light that showed that the device was working.
“Ultrasound,” I said. “It’s called a Yap Zapper. It gives a one-second burst of sound that’s—”
“Do it again,” said Rita, all curiosity, her anger and defensiveness suddenly gone. “Or wait... The dogs...?”
“They’re too far away,” I told her. “The range is ten °r twelve feet. It’s—”
“This is so weird,” Rita said. “Press it again.”
Once again, I aimed the Yap Zapper and pushed the button. Rita jerked her head as if she’d just climbed out of a swimming pool and was trying to shake the water out of her ears.
“Rita, are you hearing it? Because, supposedly, it's… It’s supposed to be out of the range of human hearing. We—people—only hear up to whatever it is, but dogs can hear sounds way, way above what we can. Rita can you hear this thing?”
“Not exactly,” Rita said. “That’s what’s so freakish. What I hear is total silence.”
26
Maybe you’re quicker than we were; maybe you got it right away. Rita and I, however, had to hit the books. Back in graduate school, Rita had taken a course that touched briefly on human hearing, and sometime thereafter she’d refreshed her knowledge by cramming for the psychology licensing exam, but she’d soon forgotten everything except some psychoanalytic gobbledygook about the erotic significance of orifices, and in her recent reading about hearing loss and hearing aids, she’d ignored the technicalities and concentrated on what she called the socioaffective aspects of—believe it or not—dialoguing and their implications for—I swear to God—languaging. Therapists!
I wasn’t much help, either. I knew that dogs could hear sounds pitched too high for human ears. To illustrate the point, I immediately produced the example of the so-called silent dog whistle inaudible to people but audible to dogs. My knowledge of the details, however, was as scanty as Rita’s.
Before long, though, we’d strewn my kitchen table with what was, even for Cambridge, an oddly assorted collection of reference materials, and, soon thereafter, we understood almost everything, which is to say, everything except the trivial matter of who.
But the how? Rita’s deceitful no-hearing-dogs self-help guide informed us that human beings don’t hear sounds above 20,000 cycles per second. According to the canine authorities, dogs are vastly superior to people in this regard. (So what else is new?) Just how vastly superior? A couple of my books said that dogs hear sounds up to about 40,000 cycles per second, but Rita came across the suggestion that dogs may even hear some sounds within the range of 70,000 to 100,000 cycles per second. Are you with me? Cycles per second is frequency—pitch —as opposed to volume in decibels, which brings us to the hearing aids and the Yap Zapper. The operating instructions for Rita’s aids assured us that since an aid with a maximum sound pressure level greater than 132 decibels may impair hearing, this model safeguarded the user by cutting off sounds louder than 113 decibels. And the Yap Zapper promotion material? The bursts of sound were, as I’d known, high-pitched, and, as I hadn’t known, 120 decibels loud. In other words, the bursts were too high-pitched for a person to hear, but, nonetheless, loud enough to make Rita’s hearing aids momentarily and automatically quit working.
Just like Stephanie’s. Rita and I reasoned that, far from malfunctioning, Stephanie’s aids were cutting out, as she described it, by responding to high volume, regardless of pitch. And Ruffly’s episodes? I hadn’t been too far off. “Sound shyness,” I said to Rita, shying away from painful slaps of loud sound pitched too high for human ears but not too high for Ruffly’s.
Not that I get off on diagnosing a veterinary problem that’s baffled Steve Delaney, D.V.M., but by the time Rita and I had worked it out, I was wired. Also, our friendship restored, we were drinking coffee, and although Rita had insisted on decaf, I was fine-tuning my nervous system with genuine Puerto Rican formula three-tablespoons-per-cup Bustelo, so I was eager to zip over to Stephanie Benson’s, where I’d modestly announce my diagnostic triumph and gracefully accept the eternal gratitude not only of the rector but of her Principal Employer, too, I assumed. I could see and hear it all. That Companion Dog Excellent title? Rowdy’s C.D.X.? Fair and square, no cheating, of course, and, yes, I know it by heart. Chapter 2, Section 7 of the Good Book, the ban on “any assistance, interference, or attempts to control a dog from outside the ring.” But if God is inside the ring? Preferably with a good grip on Rowdy’s collar and on his soul, too. Well, according to my reading of the regulations, divine intervention does not count as double handling. C.D.X., here we come!
Rita interrupted this beatific vision. “Holly? Holly, there’s a hitch.”
Naturally, I thought, coming to earth abruptly, there always is. For instance, take the time Rowdy ended up next to that Kees bitch on the sits and downs. The hitch? She absolutely must have been starting to come in season, or Rowdy’d never, ever have behaved like that. And the Retrieve on Flat? Rowdy never refuses the command. He retrieves anything, anytime, anywhere. The hitch? A silly technicality, an arbitrary rule. To qualify, the dumbbell he brings back has to be his own.
“What hitch is that?”
Rita picked up the Yap Zapper and fingered it lightly. “The maximum range is what? Twelve feet?
“That’s—”
“That’s not a hitch,” I said. “There must be a dozen of these things on the market, probably more, and they’re not all the same. The idea of this one is that you just put it in the dog’s kennel with him or else you put it in the room with him, and then when he barks, it goes off automatically; or else, if you’re there, you press the button yourself. But
they’re all different. Some of them aren’t even all that high frequency. You can hear them; they’re perfectly audible to people; they’re just really loud. All they do is substitute for someone standing there and screaming at the dog whenever he barks. On some of them, you can adjust the sensitivity so that if the dog just whines or whatever, nothing happens. Some of them react only to barking, not to whining or howling. There’s a really big one that’s meant for kennels, which is really unfair, I think, because it blasts all the dogs even if it’s only one dog that barks. Some of them aren’t even for barking; they’re for any behavior you don’t want. They’re in all the catalogs. I’ll show you.”
Which catalogs? Are you serious? No, not J. Crew and not L.L. Bean. Victoria’s Secret? Well, if your OFA excellent, CERF clear champion bitch is proving totally impossible to breed, anything’s worth a try, I guess, but if you honestly don’t know what I mean by the catalogs, I am now about to save you thousands of dollars in pet supplies. No kidding. R.C. Steele, color glossy catalog, fifty-dollar minimum order: 800-872-3773 or if you use a TDD, 800-468-8776. Cherrybrook, no illustrations, just a price list, but no minimum order, and a portion of each sale is donated to the Morris Animal Foundation: 800-524-0820. Tell ’em Holly sent you. And, no, I don’t receive a commission. So why am I revealing the inner secrets of the Sacred Brotherhood and Sisterhood of The Fancy? So you’ll stay out of pet shops that sell dogs. Why do that? Puppy mills. But that’s a whole other story.
The Cherrybrook and R.C. Steele catalogs are the essential First Books of the Kennel Supply Testament, our
Deep Discount Torah, so to speak, but before long, Rita and I were also leafing through Foster & Smith, UPCO, Master Animal Care, New England Serum, and eight or ten others, including at least two apocrypha, which is to say, yuppie-targeted, reverse-discount (double-markup) catalogs. After Rita finally quit ridiculing such everyday items as plastic-lined polka-dot lace-trimmed canine sanitary panties and a fluoride-impregnated rawhide chew in the form of a plate of spaghetti and meatballs, she got herself under control, turned to the right pages, and verified what I’d been saying. In brief, if you wanted to explode auditory dynamite in your dog’s ears, there were a lot of ways to do it—audible or inaudible to people, bark activated, manually operated, with or without adjustable sensitivity, and with or without a lot of other options, too: waterproof cases, happy tunes to reward the dog for good behavior, a maximum effective range varying all the way from a mere ten feet up to a whopping seventy-five feet.
I picked up the Yap Zapper again. “This would probably do it, if you stood right outside the window. Except, for all we know, I guess, it could be inside—one of those big kennel models? It could be any of the ones that people can’t hear. The point is, this is what’s doing it, something like this. It has to be.”
Rita looked sad and tired. “That isn’t really the Point, is it? The real point is, Holly, what a vicious, vile thing for someone to do. And to a hearing dog!”
“Ruffly’s kept right on working,” I said, “but, yeah, it could’ve gone the other way, and, Rita, Stephanie’s had Ruffly for over a year, and, by now, she takes it for granted that he’ll do the listening. So besides being really hard on him, it could’ve been... But, Rita, we don’t necessarily know.... It is possible that it’s all a mistake.”
“I don’t see how.”
I hesitated to raise the topic, but it had to be said. “In one of the catalogs? Maybe in more than one, there’s one of these ultrasound things that’s actually marketed as, uh...” As my voice dropped, my gaze rose involuntarily upward. “As, uh, the simple solution to the problem of your neighbor’s noisy dog...”
“Oh,” Rita said flatly.
“The idea is, uh, no direct confrontation. Or what to do when you’ve asked the people a million times, and the dog is still driving you crazy.”
“Yes, I get the idea.”
“So it’s possible that it isn’t even aimed at Ruffly. Ruffly can’t be the only dog around there, and he barks now and then, but he’s not a nuisance barker. As I said, those gadgets aren’t selective. If they get triggered, they just blast away. Any dog in the vicinity gets hit, not just the one making the noise. Also, whoever’s doing it doesn’t necessarily...” I didn’t finish the sentence aloud. The salt on Alice Savery’s lawn? Ivan had known that the salt would kill the grass, of course, but he was simply too young to grasp Alice Savery’s devotion to what struck me as her companion vegetables. “Rita, it’s even remotely possible that Morris Lamb owned one of those things and that it’s still in the house. Maybe if the batteries are weak... like smoke detectors? You know how they go off when the batteries are low?”
“That’s a very benign hypothesis.”
“It is,” I agreed. “And Doug... Well, I’m not sure, but Doug... Doug Winer was Morris’s partner, and it’s his house now, and he’d probably know if Morris had bought one of those things. And, of course, Doug would know exactly what something like that could do to a hearing dog, and he’s such a hovery landlord, and he knows about Ruffly’s episodes, so even if he’d forgotten that Morris had one of these gadgets, he certainly would’ve remembered by now.”
Rita smiled sourly. “Or he’s hit on a strange way to deliver an eviction notice.”
“Oh, evicting Stephanie is probably the last thing Doug wants to do,” I said. “It’s true that Doug’s cousin, who’s an old friend of Stephanie’s, did pressure him to rent to her, but why would he want her out? She’s got to be a great tenant—”
“Don’t remind me. Hard to find.”
“Hard to find,” I agreed. “And Doug lives with his elderly parents, and if he’d wanted to move the whole family to Highland Street, he had the chance, right after Morris died. And he didn’t. He stayed in Brookline with his parents, and he rented Morris’s house to Stephanie. Besides, I met his father at a show, a while ago, and I really don’t think that this would be a great time to move him anywhere. He—Mr. Winer—is... I guess he’s in the early stages of Alzheimer’s, and it seems to me it would be pretty disorienting for him to move from where he is. But that’s... You don’t know Doug. If he wanted Stephanie out, he’d just... Come to think of it, I’m not sure what he’d do. He wouldn’t just order her out. He’d be very polite about it, I think. He’d keep apologizing, and he’d fuss about where she was going to go, and he’d give her all the time she needed, that kind of thing.” Rita looked skeptical. My friendship with Doug Winer was a mere acquaintanceship, but Rita didn’t know him at all. “Holly, tell me something.” She took the Yap Zapper from my hand. “Just how accessible are these things?”
“Well, you just saw. They’re in the catalogs.”
“Have you ever seen one anywhere else? In a store?” I tried to remember. “Not that I can think of. Maybe at shows, but I don’t think so. As far as I know, they’re mainly a catalog item.”
Thus accessible to...? I remembered the stack of kennel supply catalogs on the cookbook shelves in Morris Lamb’s kitchen, catalogs available to Morris, of course and to Doug Winer and to his tenants, Stephanie and, of course, Matthew. And only a few hours earlier, I’d seen Ivan with the same catalogs.
Rita patted the R.C. Steele catalog, which sat on top of the pile on my table. “Holly, does Stephanie order from these?”
“She might. But Morris Lamb did, I’m sure—Morris was a dog person—and his catalogs are still there, at his house. At least I assume they were Morris’s. But Stephanie wouldn’t... Rita, why would Stephanie...?”
“I wasn’t thinking of her,” Rita said. “I was wondering about the son.”
“Matthew?”
“Matthew. Didn’t you or Leah tell me that it came as something of a surprise to him, having his mother move here with him?”
“Yes.” I hesitated. “On the other hand, Rita, he seems quite devoted to Stephanie. That’s how he talks about her, and, before she got Ruffly, apparently, Matthew rigged up gadgets to help her, and he’s still the one who checks her phones, stuff lik
e that.”
Rita made one of those noncommittal therapist noises.
“He’s too polite to go around bad-mouthing his mother,” I argued, “but the sense I have, honestly, is that he’s, if anything, more devoted to her than most kids that age are to their parents. Like tonight? Stephanie is having this little barbecue.”
“I know. She invited me. I’m going.”
“Good. Well, Matthew and Leah are going to be there, and a lot of kids that age would refuse. It’s the last thing they’d want to do. But, you know, I’m just guessing-
It really is hard to tell how Matthew feels about anything. Except Leah. How he feels about her is pretty obvious.” I thought for a second and added, “And dogs. You can’t miss it. One thing that’s perfectly obvious is that Matthew does not like dogs.”
27
Stephanie Benson was a little too heavy of body and mind to approach cuteness, but when I aimed the Yap Zapper at her and said, “Okay, stick ’em up,” her wide grin displayed those clean, square teeth, and she dutifully raised her hands. I pressed the button, the little red light blinked, and, instead of lowering her arms, Stephanie raised them high, waved her hands from the wrist, and made her fingers dance gleefully.
“The applause of the deaf,” she explained.
Although science would also have had us aim the Yap Zapper at Ruffly, Stephanie and I agreed to assume that we’d found the cause of the dog’s problems. Before trying the device, we’d banished Ruffly to the deck, where Doug Winer was puttering with the valve of the gas grill, and, to make doubly sure of sparing Ruffly any discomfort, we’d gone all the way to the living room, at the front of the house, before activating the Yap Zapper. When the experiment was successfully completed, we immediately returned to the kitchen, not only because Stephanie was in the middle of preparing food for what she persisted in calling Ruffly’s birthday party, but also because she was determined to find out whether the Yap Zapper would explain her problems with the telephone as miraculously as it had demystified both Ruffly’s episodes and the apparent malfunction of her aids.
Ruffly Speaking Page 18