by Susan Conant
“Three days ago? And you’re the one who’s always saying that dog show food—”
“Coffee. I drank some dog show coffee.” At any dog show in the United States, including the posh benched shows, even Westminster, you’d swear that the pale liquid that comes out of those industrial-size percolators is yet another item in the Flee-B-Gon product line. But, as I’d assured Cheryl Simms, the stuff really is safe to drink.
“But this is Wednesday. That was—”
“Then it must have been something else. I keep throwing up. Chicken! I ate some chicken. I knew it tasted funny.”
When Steve had failed to talk me into going to the Mount Auburn emergency room, he offered to come and take care of me, but I assured him that I was already feeling better and just needed to go to sleep. Alone. We exchanged our usual sweet nothings about the cute things our dogs had done recently, and I promised to call him the next day.
Then I went upstairs to Rita’s and persuaded her to take care of Rowdy and Kimi in the morning. The previous spring, when I’d had a different reason to ask the same favor, Rita heard me out and ended up eyeing me as if I’d lost my mind. Rita is a clinical psychologist. In other circumstances, I might have paused to evaluate my own sanity, but, in the sport of tracking, predawn madness is normal and necessary.
“Let me get this straight,” Rita had said solemnly. “Correct me if I’m wrong, but as I understand it, you want me to let your dogs out and in, and give them breakfast, because you’re getting up at four A.M. and driving an hour and a half to an empty field where you’re going to take a walk so that, sometime later, a dog can come along and follow in your footsteps.”
Before she’d gone on to refer me to a psychiatrist who specialized in heavy-duty medication, I explained that I owed it to the club to help and that it isn’t all that easy to recruit experienced track layers. She rolled her eyes toward the ceiling and said that she couldn’t imagine why not.
As you’ll have gathered, Rita is not a real dog person. Tracking tests around here always take place on weekends and never in winter. A tracking test on a Thursday morning in the middle of February? But Rita bought the story and agreed to help with the dogs. As usual, she touted out a few silly rationalizations about why she couldn’t walk them, even one at a time. In my absence, Rowdy might decide to take on his archenemy, an aggressive neighborhood cocker owned by people incapable of socializing a goldfish. Kimi might be seized by one of her frenzied impulses to dash around in wild circles until Rita ended up like a trussed chicken, her ankles bound by the leash. Hadn’t I once remarked that the Alaskan malamute wasn’t a scissorable breed? Well, it wasn’t a walkable breed, either, and it was barely feedable, too. But I didn’t protest. The yard is fenced. I just said thanks.
Then I prepared the Bronco. The back already held two large wire-mesh dog crates and two blankets. I added some additional blankets, two bowls, and a gallon jug of fresh water. Back indoors, I got out a medium-size dark gray backpack and began to assemble the items I’d need. I put a fresh bulb and two new D batteries in one flashlight and also replaced the bulb and the two AA batteries in the Mini Mag-Lite my father gave me for Christmas.
In a burgundy case on the top shelf of my bedroom closet, I found another present from Buck, a Smith&Wesson Model 60 Ladysmith, stainless steel with a frosted finish, the pocket pit bull of .38 specials, the perfect companion animal for the girl who really, really can say no. I’m more at home with a deer rifle or a .22 than I am with a revolver, but I’m not a bad shot. When you had a date to go to the movies, I had one to go out to the dump and shoot rats. Repulsive? Now, yes, but remember that there weren’t any movie theaters in Owls Head. Also, I did learn to hit a moving target. So I added the Ladysmith, ammo, the holster (another Christmas present), a pair of wire cutters, a small camera with a built-in flash, a nylon training collar, a six-foot leather lead, and a length of gauze that would do as a muzzle.
Then I concentrated on the big problem: the noise of the dogs. As you probably know, bark-control devices are in vogue these days. The simplest kind is just a tight muzzle that holds the dog’s mouth shut. But how many dogs did Walter and Cheryl Simms have? I didn’t know for sure, but far too many for me to run around muzzling. Antibark collars would have the same drawback. You know what they are? Some emit high-frequency sound waves that bother a dog’s sensitive ears. The others are bark-triggered shock collars, which I wouldn’t have used even if I’d had the requisite supply sitting around. Write me off as a softhearted fanatic if you want, but I don’t believe in giving electric shocks to dogs. Anyway, individual collars were out. High tech offered one more option, namely, a little manually-operated box that, like the collars, makes a high-pitched sound inaudible to people but very unpleasant to dogs. There’s even a long-distance model marketed to desperate people whose neighbors’ dogs are driving them crazy but that one, I thought, made a buzz that people could hear. In any case, I didn’t own one of these devices, and, even ignoring the problem of ethics, there was a hitch: As far as I knew, the gadgets didn’t work instantly. According to the ads I’d seen, they were used to train dogs to quit barking, not to provide immediate silence. Even so, if I’d had one handy, I might have packed it.
As it was, I intended to get in and out fast, and I counted mainly on being mistaken for a natural intruder, a foraging raccoon or a stray dog passing swiftly on its way. My backup plan was based on the inability of the average dog to bark and chew at the same time. I filled a gallon-size plastic bag with the small dog biscuits that I use as training treats, and in a second plastic bag I packed my secret cache of medium-size rawhide bones. Secret? Banned by Steve, who says that rawhide would be safe if Rowdy and Kimi would chew it slowly like normal dogs instead of swallowing it in big chunks that could obstruct their intestinal tracts. But the damned thing is, they love the stuff, thus the secret cache: one rawhide bone for every leg of an obedience title. But do me a favor, huh? Don’t tell Steve, and don’t mention it to anyone else, either. Because of my column and all that, I’m supposed to be a model of responsible ownership. Only my all-forgiving dogs know my deepest sins.
Anyhow, whether or not I should have packed the rawhide bones, that’s what I did. Then I stowed everything in the backpack, shut it in a closet where the dogs couldn’t raid the goodies, and laid out my clothes: jeans, a black sweater, my old navy parka, a tattered navy poncho, wool socks and gloves, and heavy hiking boots. When Rowdy, Kimi, and I returned from a walk around the block, I took a shower, set the alarm for four A.M., went to bed, and fell asleep. Why not? My conscience was finally starting to feel clear.
27
I don’t go to funerals anymore. My recent knowledge of them is entirely celluloid. I have the impression that graveside ceremonies are usually held in the rain and often attended by people who can’t carry the tune of “Amazing Grace.” A common convenience at Mafia burials is a large canopy to protect the lace-shrouded widow from the drizzle. At the back of the crowd lurk henchmen whose overdeveloped trapezius muscles strain the shoulder seams of ill-gotten hand-tailored suits. Male mourners exchange whispered plans to avenge the deceased.
My almost exclusively cinematic experience of funerals has probably misled me. In fact, I know it has. For example, at the real thing, the air reeks of gladioli instead of popcorn, or so I seem to recall. Also, in real life, the sad part doesn’t exactly come as a big surprise, so I’ll bet that no one ever has to make do with greasy paper napkins. The rest I’m not sure about.
What reminded me of movie funerals and the unanswered question of their correspondence to reality was the canopy of leafless, dripping branches that overhung Old County Lane in Afton at five-thirty on the morning of February fourteenth. Italian women did not sob in the thick undergrowth that lined the road. Hardy pioneers did not grieve for brethren outgunned by Jack Palance. Were canopies strictly Hollywood?
Oh, yeah. I didn’t go to real puppy mills, either, not as a rule. I’d read about them and heard about them. I’d seen
photos and films. I thought I knew. I really believed that the sad part would come as no surprise.
Back to real life. As I may have mentioned, Old County Lane was little more than its name suggested, a roughly paved country road just about wide enough to accommodate my Bronco. Like every other blacktopped surface in Massachusetts, it was randomly mined with vicious potholes. As I crawled through the darkness at a maximum of maybe ten miles an hour, they eluded my headlights and defeated the Bronco’s suspension system. To the best of my recollection, the Simmses’ place was about a mile after the turnoff onto the lane and about a quarter mile beyond a nondescript brown house with a large, distinctive red mailbox. I’d reset the trip meter at the turnoff. At .6 miles, the red mailbox appeared on my right. I was positive that this was the last house before the Simmses’. If I remembered correctly, what lay beyond on the right was, first, a stretch of woods, then an open field, and then a smaller wooded area that separated the field from the roughly cleared patch of land around the Simmses’. I slowed way down and trained my eyes on the right-hand side of the road. Although I couldn’t have been doing more than five miles an hour, the Bronco hit a hole that threw my teeth out of alignment. I swore. Then the field suddenly appeared. I killed the headlights and pulled to the side of the road, but when I got out, I left the door open and the engine running.
Sooner than I expected, I found what I suspected would be there, a break in the tumbledown stone wall and the thin line of mixed maples and weeds that divided the field from the road, and a welcome pair of ruts left by the tires of last summer’s farm equipment. Returning to my Bronco, I locked the hubs, got back in, shifted to four-wheel drive, eased into the field, and pulled to the left, out of the ruts and onto a firm, grassy area where the saplings that overgrew the wall would help to screen the car from the lane. I turned off the engine and opened the door. In the distance, a couple of dogs barked. At me? Or maybe at a skunk or a thieving raccoon or a bold individual extending the coyote’s range.
Except for the voices of the dogs, the silence was absolute. I tried not to break it. At least to my own ears, my efforts failed. To load the Ladysmith, you press the thumbpiece forward, thus unlocking the cylinder so you can turn it. You put the rounds of ammunition in the charge holes, and you turn the cylinder back into the frame until it locks. The procedure doesn’t normally sound like grapefruit-size hailstones falling on a tin roof. And, yes, I know it’s unsafe to carry a loaded revolver, but what was I going to do? Protect myself with an unloaded firearm stuffed in the bottom of my backpack? By the way, even though Buck had the holster specially made for me, it was a stupid present. Underarm might have been okay. But did he really expect me to swagger around like Annie Oakley with a gun on my hip? I left my parka unzipped, but when I pulled the tattered old poncho over my head, the fabric swished and moaned like a high wind. The car door closed like a clap of thunder.
But once I was moving across the furrows and tussocks of the field, my inaudible footsteps seemed to deaden the air like white noise. At the edge of the field, I pulled out my two-D-battery flashlight and, using my hand to shade the beam, flipped it on. Ahead of me lay a low stone wall, the traditional New England marker of boundaries. This one, though, like the one that bordered the lane, hadn’t been mended for decades. Good fences? But who reads Robert Frost these days? Walter and Cheryl Simms were no one’s idea of good neighbors, anyway. The Norway maple, the kudzu of the rural Northeast, had sown itself thickly on both sides of the wall. On top, rusted strands of old barbed wire waited to snare and trip the unwary, but it didn’t get me. As I’ve said, I grew up in Maine.
The woods beyond the wall were so dark that it would have been easy to believe that the sun was waiting for the first of April to rise briefly and, even then, only as a mean joke. Ever been in the woods around here? Well, if not, forget the postcards of model sugar bushes in Vermont and the travel brochure pictures of groomed forests in state-owned park land. When I say woods, I don’t mean a Christmas tree farm or a spruce plantation, either. I mean thick brush, impenetrable clumps of alders, fallen logs, and the tough vines of wild blackberries, God’s own barbed wire. I took a deep breath and searched for a route through the undergrowth. There was an earthy smell of wet moss, slow-decaying leaves, and the decomposing bodies of microscopic animals.
But I hit it lucky. To my right, I found the remains of an old path, maybe the trace of a lumber road, maybe the vestige of a long-dead friendship between neighbors whose houses had sunk into cellar holes. With the filtered beam of the flashlight aimed at my feet, I took firm steps on the packed-down earth. Then the barking of a couple of dogs gave way to a voice entirely different from theirs. I have no ear for human music, but I am a connoisseur of howls. This one lacked the volume, range, and melody of Rowdy’s—he is a canine Pavarotti—but it was unmistakably the song of one of his kin, the howl of an Alaskan malamute. Missy? Or maybe not. But a malamute, one of my own.
As if the sound waves carried scent, at the exact second the howl reached my ears, the stench invaded my nostrils and pressed like a determined finger on the back of my throat. I’d eaten breakfast. Maybe I should have started out on an empty stomach. The fresh coffee I’d drunk had turned as stale and bitter as if I’d swallowed the filter and grounds. My breath stank of indigestion, and the damp air reeked of dogs and filth.
I reached the clearing around the Simmses’ place. The road was somewhere to my left, hidden in the night. The sagging roof of the shabby little house dipped in a U-shape against a patch of sky visible through the cloud cover. The ruins of the sheet-metal broiler farm were straight ahead. Scattered between the remains of the big, ugly building and my spot at the edge of the woods were three little sheds that looked something like outmoded and abandoned overnight cabins and even more like miniature outhouses, which, in case I’ve lost you, is the only word for privies ever spoken by loyal natives of the State of Maine.
In the shelter of the woods, I turned off the flashlight, slipped off the backpack, and transferred the camera, a collar, and a lead to the pockets of my parka. I removed my gloves, stowed them in the pack, and hefted it on again. Then I made for the nearest little shack. The closer I got to it, the more it smelled like an outhouse, but the less it looked like one. It was roughly the shape of a prefab tool shed intended for the suburban yard of a diminutive gardener. To avoid stumbling on the pieces of unidentifiable junk that seemed to be strewn everywhere, I circled carefully around and located the door on the side that faced the back of the property. With the little shed and the high walls of the ruined broiler farm between me and the house, I removed the penlight from my pocket, held it against my hand, flicked it on, and used its beam to find a big, sturdy hook and eye, the door’s only latch. I had to push up hard on the cold, wet metal to raise the hook, and it cleared the eye with a sudden snap that sounded loud enough to awaken Diane Sweet. I held perfectly still. Inside the building, something stirred. I switched to the big flashlight, and holding it poised to turn on, I inched open the door.
I’m not afraid of dogs, of course, but I’m not naive, either. Ever been bitten? And I mean bitten, not just pinched or nipped. Like being slammed with a nail-spiked baseball bat, right? Intense pain and sorely wounded feelings, too. But I lost my pride a long time ago. Sure, dogs understand that I love them, but they’ll bite me nonetheless.
Consequently, before entering the windowless little shack, I braced the door with one hand, and with the other, I raised the flashlight and inserted it in the crack of the door. I flicked on the beam and peered in. The first thing I saw was a slowly moving mass of white that momentarily baffled me. A motherless litter of Westie puppies? For a second, I scanned for tiny heads or eyes or tails, details that would let my brain read this pale, teeming blob as squirming newborn pups. For God’s sake, the stench should have told me; I didn’t really need my eyes at all. And even the ugliest, wettest newborn pup looks nothing like a thick swarm of maggots feeding on a disgusting pile of feces.
I tugg
ed the door closed behind me and turned on the big flashlight. There were puppies, too, an unborn litter that swelled the belly of the emaciated golden retriever bitch who barely dragged herself to her feet when I entered. I was raised by golden retrievers; compared with goldens, my human parents were the incidental figures of my early childhood. Vinnie and Danny were goldens. I have handled goldens in breed and obedience. I have trained dozens of them, groomed hundreds, and admired thousands. This bitch’s coat was so caked with filth that it took me a second to identify her breed. Or maybe I just couldn’t let myself see her as a golden. Lack of food and exercise had left her with bone in place of muscle and flesh. Although she managed to rise to her feet, she didn’t approach me. In fact, she seemed neither friendly nor wary, but merely stood there aimlessly, her tail immobile, her eyes vacant. The golden retriever is a superb obedience breed, of course. Acting as her own trainer and handler, this golden seemed to have taught herself the trick of feeling nothing at all. In her circumstances, she couldn’t have chosen more wisely.
My hands dripping with sweat, I pulled out the camera and photographed the living things I saw: the golden retriever bitch and the maggots that lived on the feces she’d pitifully tried to confine to one end of the shed. Then I got a couple of tiny dog biscuits from my pack, placed them on my open palm, and slowly extended it toward her. At the sight of a moving hand, though, she cringed. I’d been wrong. She hadn’t lost all feeling after all. I dropped the treats onto the dirt floor and left.
28
The damp air outside the shed should have seemed almost fresh after the toxic-smelling fumes the poor golden breathed, but it didn’t, and my mouth tasted as though I’d caught a gum disease that was spreading to my tongue and throat. I wanted to find Missy and get out. But was she here? I leaned against the shed and gave my eyes a chance to recover from the camera flash and readapt to the darkness. I was facing the back of the property. Ahead of me were two more little outbuildings. A black mass of trees rose in the distance. In the cleared area to my left, between the trees and the nearby ruins of the massive chicken coop, I could make out a scatter of low, dark lumps. Oil drums? Then one of them moved. A chain rattled. I glanced around the corner of the shed to check out the house. No lights were on. Stepping much more slowly and carefully than I’d have liked, I started toward that moving lump chained in the field. The darkness made the Simmses’ whole spread look vast, but, by daylight, it had seemed small, and my feet covered the ground quickly. In what seemed like seconds, the lump came into focus as a big, wolflike dog.