Gone to the Dogs

by Susan Conant

  Arlene looked disappointed. “Was he really from the Bronx? That doesn’t … I mean, you don’t expect …”

  “Yes, he was definitely from the Bronx,” Jackie told her. “He’d lost his New York accent.” She added, as if the new information would contradict the old, “But he was very attractive to women, in a kind of Errol Flynn, Lord Byron way, lots of curly dark hair? Except a lot shorter. But when you got to know him, he was very, very bossy. Just ask Lee. Lee, I’ve been saying how bossy Oscar could be, and I want you to back me up on that. Is that true? Now when you got to know Oscar, was that one bossy, bossy man?”

  Lee, who’d been edging toward the kitchen, stopped, turned, and raised his narrow chin about one inch.

  “You see?” Jackie said. “Lee says the same thing. But the owners liked it. They like a firm statement. It builds confidence. I always tell Lee: Owners aren’t paying to hear what all the possibilities are. Lecture them all about what it could be, and they decide you’re guessing, and they aren’t one bit happy to pay today’s fees for some shot in the dark. That’s one reason Oscar was so popular.”

  “From what I hear,” said Ron Coughlin, who was sitting next to me on the floor, “there was one guy he wasn’t all that popular with.”

  “Or one woman he really was,” said Barbara Doyle. I remembered that she was a Patterson fan. The one time I’d seen Oscar Patterson, at the poetry reading, he hadn’t looked like Lord Byron to me, except that his hair was dark and that he’d forgotten to do up the top buttons on his shirt. But Barbara does look romantic. She has fluffy curls and wears lacy, velvety clothes that are totally impractical for someone with German shepherds.

  “No, no,” Jackie said. “I don’t know why people are saying that, because it was definitely, definitely Cliff Bourque, and if Oscar had minded his own business and let Lee take care of that dog, it never would’ve happened.”

  “What kind of dog was it?” I asked. If fate assigns you a role, why recast yourself? Besides, maybe because the story about the young Patterson cradling the newborn puppies had touched me, I felt protective toward him and even toward Geri, whom I didn’t know at all. At any rate, I was glad that Jackie hadn’t told everyone that Geri was pregnant and that Patterson might have run out on her. I wanted Jackie to talk about anything else, preferably dogs rather than people.

  Jackie answered my question about Cliff Bourque’s dog. “Some kind of sled dog,” she said. “Lee will know.”

  “A malamute?” I asked. The Alaskan malamute isn’t a rare breed, of course. Even so, the number of people active in the breed, people who show or belong to the clubs, is small enough so that I know, or at least know of, a lot of them. I’d never heard of any Cliff Bourque.

  “Uh-uh. Something weird. They had a few of them, him and his wife. She was my hairdresser, which is how I know, and she’s a very, very nice woman. I feel sorry for her. He must be a very disturbed man. A vet.”

  I was stunned. Why would a vet have …?

  “Vietnam,” Jackie said. “For all we know, and I for one think it’s very likely, Cliff had some kind of flashback, and when Oscar broke the news that the dog was dead, it took him back to the jungle, and he went completely out of control. And what he did then was take to the woods, if you ask me.” She swept a hand wildly toward some imaginary forest.

  “That’s awful,” Arlene said.

  “His poor wife,” said someone else.

  “Could be worse,” Ron murmured to me. “If she’s a hairdresser, probably she at least knows how to groom—”

  But Jackie overheard. “You know, it’s no joking matter,” she said severely.

  I felt chastised. It seemed to me that off and on over the past few days, I’d been guilty of treating Oscar Patterson’s unsolved disappearance as something of a joking matter. In spite of her irksome dramatics, Jackie Miner, though, clearly took it very seriously indeed.

  Ron apologized. Everyone fell silent. Mostly to smooth over the awkwardness, Ray Metcalf changed the subject. “Well, there’s one thing I’ve heard about Oscar Patterson that I can’t help admiring, and that’s that he taught Dickie Brenner a good lesson.”

  “Brenner!” Jackie said. “Well, I can tell you positively everything about him, and none of it’s good! Before I knew better, I took Willie to him, and let me tell you …”

  Both Ron and I had had about enough of Jackie, and as he followed me into the kitchen, he asked, “Who’s this Brenner?”

  I refilled the ice bucket and tidied up around the sink. “Some kind of dog behavior expert. A consultant.”

  In Cambridge at least, consultant means anything or nothing, or maybe I’m still too much an outsider to understand what it does mean except that consultants tell other people what to do. Can that be right? Why should people pay all these consultants to give them a lot of advice they probably don’t want and won’t take? Anyway, Vince, our head trainer, and Roz, who does our advanced classes, evidently understood the word or shared my take on it, because they both stepped in to gripe about Brenner.

  “Those people make me so mad!” said Roz, who seldom looks or acts more than quietly annoyed. In dog training, anger is useful only as a warning that it’s time to stop, and Roz is too busy to waste time on anything useless. She keeps her gray hair short and straight, wears indestructible, indistinguishable wash-and-wear clothes, and seldom seems to feel any strong emotion except love for dogs and pride in their achievements. But she can seethe if she thinks they’re being mistreated. “Do you know what he does?” She looked slowly around at us.

  “What do people expect?” Vince said. “They’re too lazy to train their own dogs, and they turn them over to someone else.”

  “Fine for them,” Roz said, “But what about the dogs? They don’t deserve it, do they? And Brenner’s not the only one, either.”

  “Would someone tell me who Brenner is?” Ron asked.

  “You see?” Roz said. “You people haven’t even heard of Brenner, and the reason why is that you won’t catch him in an obedience ring, not on your life. You know what he tells people? ‘Oh, those AKC types. They don’t know anything.’ And what he does, Ron, is to get people to leave their dogs there, with him, supposedly to be trained, or else he charges them a fortune for private lessons with the dog, where he does all the training, if you want to call it that. What I call it is abuse, plain and simple.” Roz clenched her jaw and pinched her lips together. Her eyes flashed.

  “Rubber hoses,” Vince said.

  “Is that what it is?” I said. “Jesus. Mostly all I know about Brenner is that I’ve seen the ads. Off-leash training, right?”

  “But doesn’t the guy have to have some kind of credentials?” Ron asked. “He must’ve done something.”

  “Yeah,” Vince said. “Brenner’s credentials are that he put up a sign and took out some ads, and then he was an instant expert. And then after a while, the ads said he’d been in business a long time, and after a while, it was true enough. He had been.”

  “So how did Oscar Patterson …?” I started to ask.

  “Brenner’s up in that area somewhere,” Vince said. “I heard about it from Ray, because the dog that Brenner and Patterson had the fight about a couple of months back was a Clumber spaniel.”

  Ray and Lynne Metcalf raise Clumber spaniels. In case you haven’t seen one—they’re fairly rare—I should mention that they have long bodies like basset hounds, massive heads, and soft, light-colored coats. A Clumber is about as tall as an English springer spaniel, but much, much heftier.

  “What happened,” Vince continued, “is that Ray and Lynne sold a show pup to some people in New Hampshire, and he did a lot of winning, and they never had any trouble with him. The dog was great with kids, nice around the house, all that. Then these people heard about this off-leash training, and I guess that sounded like a good idea, and instead of asking Ray and Lynne, they just sent him to Brenner, and when they got him back, it was like they had a different dog. He flew at the woman, then he bit som
e kid, and then he really did a job on the guy’s face. Patterson was their vet, and he’d known the dog all along, and when he heard the story, he figured it out, and he went to Brenner’s place and socked him one in the jaw.”

  “Good for him,” I said.

  “So what happened to the dog?” Ron asked.

  “Ask Ray,” Vince said. “Last thing I heard, they still had him. This just happened, maybe a month ago, six weeks, something like that. These people in New Hampshire didn’t want the dog anymore and, of course, Ray and Lynne took him back, and what are they going to do with him?”

  “Jackie Miner took a dog to Brenner,” I said. “She had some kind of bad experience. I’m not sure what. Anyway, she had the sense not to go back. I think I’ll ask her about it.”

  “The Dog’s Life spotlight team, huh?” Ron said.

  That’s what the Boston Globe’s exposé people are called, the spotlight team. If you’re familiar with politics here in Massachusetts—the Vote Early and Vote Often State—you know that there’s usually plenty to expose, and when there isn’t, the indomitable spotlight team does anyway, or that’s what people say.

  “Dog’s Life publishes some anti-pet-shop articles,” I said in defense of my employer. “And a few opinion pieces about how the AKC isn’t doing anything to close down puppy mills. I could do something about what to watch out for if you go to one of these dog behavior consultants. Some of our readers are new owners or sort of casual owners. They want to be responsible, but they don’t necessarily know how. That’s one reason they subscribe. If their dogs might be abused, they want to be warned.”

  After that, Ron and Roz helped me to put out the desserts and coffee. I was really glad that Rita and Kevin weren’t there, and although I’d been a little disappointed that John had never arrived, I decided that it was probably for the best, especially when Hope used one of the paper coffee cups and a kitchen chair to demonstrate how to collect a urine specimen from a dog and then added cream and sugar and drank from the same cup. Rita and Kevin would’ve turned puce. I wasn’t sure about John. As it was, though, everyone had a good time and stayed late.

  While I was helping the Miners to find their coats, I remembered to ask Lee about the dog that died the night Oscar Patterson vanished. “Cliff Bourque’s dog?” I said. “Is that right?”

  “Yes,” he said as he carefully zipped his parka and did up all of those snaps and Velcro fasteners around the neck that most people ignore.

  “I heard it was a sled dog,” I said. “I wondered what kind. Because I have malamutes?”

  “Oh, it wasn’t a malamute,” he said.

  “No, I heard it wasn’t,” I said.

  “Lee, she already knows what it wasn’t,” Jackie insisted. “She wants to know what it was.”

  “Well, I’m not sure I remember exactly,” he said. “It doesn’t really matter, does it?”

  “No, I guess not,” I said.

  When everyone had left, I put all the food away and starting gathering up crumpled napkins, paper cups, and other trash. As I was snuffing candles and picking up paper plates in the living room, I noticed something odd about the Christmas tree. My family tradition decrees that ornaments belong out of the reach of puppies, but otherwise they go wherever you happen to want to hang them. The dogs will jostle the tree and knock it over a few times, so there’s no point in taking pains over a careful arrangement, is there? My random scatter must have bothered Lee Miner. I’d noticed that he’d been toying with the ornaments, but I hadn’t expected this meticulous rearrangement. On the exact tips of the branches, I found a “Puppy’s First Christmas,” then a dove or some other ordinary ornament, then a sled dog, then an ordinary ornament, then a puppy again, and so forth in tedious, equidistant repetition. The slight natural asymmetry of the fir, cut from my father’s lot in Owls Head, had probably offended Lee. I was willing to bet that if Lee Miner had happened to be toting a pair of secateurs, he’d have pruned the tree, too.

  In need of some healthy chaos, I let Rowdy and Kimi out of the bedroom. While they were snuffling and nosing around after crumbs, I carried two bags of trash outside to the barrels so the dogs wouldn’t rip through the plastic and make themselves sick on chicken bones and grease-smeared aluminum foil. Malamutes will eat anything. Kimi, for example, had once knocked a jar of blueberry jam off a counter and lapped up the mess, glass and all. The true basis of the Alaskan malamute’s low opinion of human judgment is our wasteful habit of always discarding good bread, meat, and milk just when they’ve ripened to a yummy slimy green and begun to stink like rancid Roquefort.

  The only creature I’ve ever encountered that’s as truly omnivorous as the Alaskan malamute is that other agile, persistent, highly intelligent champion trash-raider, the Cambridge raccoon. Raccoons are here by the hundred, maybe by the thousand, and that’s why every sensible Cambridge resident has trash barrels with lock-on lids. Nothing really defeats raccoons; the point is simply to discourage them. Raccoons hibernate in winter, but the weird December warmth must have fooled them, because I’d glimpsed one scuttling out of my driveway and down Appleton Street only a few nights earlier.

  Anyway, I was standing on the edge of my blacktop driveway, underneath the flight of wood steps that leads up to my back door, when I thought I heard one. I’d dumped the trash bags into a barrel and locked the lid, and I was thinking about the raccoon I’d seen the other night and wondering whether I should try one of my dozens of useless raccoon-proofing devices. As I was eyeing a pile of concrete blocks and not enjoying the prospect of hoisting them on top of the barrels, I heard something.

  The neighborhood was unusually quiet that night. Rita was away, of course, as were my third-floor tenants. On the far side of my driveway, the Dennehys’ house was dark; Kevin and his mother were still out, or else they’d gone to bed. The undergraduates who normally wander all around Cambridge had gone home for vacation, and even the traffic around the corner on Concord Avenue was light. Then something rustled. Something stirred. The sound seemed to come from the vicinity of the overgrown lilac bushes at the end of my drive or maybe from beneath my Bronco. In the hope of seeing a raccoon, I moved slowly toward the bottom of the stairs, where I stopped and waited. Yeah, raccoons make a mess of the trash, and I know better than to feed them or try to pat them. And, yes, they can carry rabies, and even though Rowdy and Kimi are always up on their shots, I don’t want raccoons around, partly because the dogs would happily kill them. But God damn. Have you ever had two or three raccoons peer down at you from the notch of a tree? They have got to be the cutest animals in the world.

  I heard another rustle, then a pleading groan. Raccoons rustle, and when they mate, they shriek like human beings in pain, but they never groan. I ran up the back stairs and into my kitchen, where I grabbed a flashlight, snatched a leash from the collection that hangs on the kitchen door, and snapped it onto Rowdy’s collar. Then I smacked my lips to him, tried to explain to Kimi that we were not going for a walk, eased Rowdy out the door, and left Kimi shut inside. I stopped on the landing just outside the door, but Rowdy, apparently unconvinced by my apology to Kimi, headed eagerly down the stairs, his eyes shining in the light of the flood over the door, his beautiful white tail waving back and forth.

  “Is anyone there?” I called as I followed Rowdy. It was a stupid question. I knew that someone was there. “Are you hurt?”

  At the bottom of the stairs, where I expected Rowdy to head toward the street, he turned and made his way past the Bronco, toward the opposite end of the drive. I hauled him in close to me and called again, more softly this time, “Is anyone there?”

  One of the bare lilac branches moved, and I tried to see over the Bronco to the base of the shrubs, but my big car and its shadow blocked my view. Who did I think was there? A victim, I suppose, someone who’d been mugged or a homeless person seeking shelter. Although I’d taken the precaution of getting my powerful, fearless dog, I wasn’t afraid. On the contrary, that heartfelt groan had left me wi
th an urgent sense that someone needed help.

  A tall figure suddenly rose from the lilacs on the far side of the Bronco, sprang over the ugly barberry hedge that divides the Dennehys’ yard from mine, and tore off around the back of their house.

  A lot of men in Cambridge have beards, of course. There are plenty of tall men here, too, and I’m sure that lots of them wear light-colored jackets. But if I hadn’t recognized the man, I’d have let Rowdy take off after him, and I’d have pursued him myself. I’d have done my best to catch him and demand what the hell he’d been doing hanging around my house. As it was, I patted Rowdy and told him that everything was okay. I never lie to dogs. It was true in the sense that I didn’t want Rowdy to do anything. Then I ran the beam of my flashlight over the damp ground under the shrubs and discovered one thing John Buckley had been doing there: When I picked up the empty whiskey bottle, its glass neck was still warm from his hands.

  7

  During my Monday morning postparty cleanup, I destroyed Lee Miner’s joyless redecoration of my tree. To rehang everything in happy Winter-family jumble, I had to keep stepping over Rowdy and Kimi, who’d prostrated themselves before the Christmas tree. They rolled onto their backs, tucked in their heavy-boned legs, and opened their great jaws to display twin grinning mouthfuls of lupine dentition. Let me tell you, if you’ve never seen a malamute holding that pose before a Christmas tree, you don’t begin to know what silly means.

  I got out the camera, snapped a lot of pictures, promised to mail them to The Malamute Quarterly, and thus dislodged Rowdy and Kimi so I could vacuum. Then I called Charity Wilson to check on Groucho. Rita had driven him to Haverhill on Sunday morning. I’d half expected her to return with him that evening and announce that she was canceling her trip, but, to my surprise, Charity had passed Rita’s inspection. As Hope had suggested, Charity was going to keep Groucho in the house with her, and, according to Rita, the place was more or less a doggy bed-and-breakfast, a country inn. Groucho would sleep in his own cushioned wicker basket from home and eat the prescription food that Steve had ordered for him. Rita’s main worry had been that he’d be left alone, but she was relieved to discover that Charity spent most of her time in the house. Rita had found Charity and her business somewhat eccentric, but, as I’ve mentioned, Rita is not a true dog person. Charity designed and made hand-knit sweaters and hand-sewn, custom-tailored raincoats and parkas for dogs. Eccentric? According to one estimate, Americans spend more than ten million dollars a year on dog clothes.