Black Ribbon (18 page)

“Is there dessert?” Cam asked.

“Rice pudding,” Ginny said.

Cam had as little interest in rice pudding as I did, but we both accepted Ginny’s offer to bring coffee. When Ginny had departed, I said, “You know, Eva really does go around saying awful things about her.”

“Eva says awful things about everyone. It’s a miracle that no one’s taken that woman to court.”

“Ginny could probably sue her for slander,” I said. “This morning, after agility? I could
not
get away from Eva, and she went on and on about Bingo and Ginny. What she says—and I had the feeling that she tells this to everyone—is all about how Ginny has too many dogs, and how no one sees her kennels, she doesn’t socialize her puppies, that kind of thing.”

“Ginny does have too many dogs,” Cam said.

“She does?”

“I think so, but then probably she thinks so, too. She keeps her old dogs, and she takes her dogs back, and she ends up keeping an awful lot of them. What is true is that—Look, her third husband was a vet, okay? George. Everyone says he was a lovely man, a prince.”

“What did he die of?” I asked.

“Heart attack, I think. Anyway, I guess Ginny got used to not paying vet bills.”

“A lot of breeders do their own shots,” I said.

“Ginny does a little more than that. And she waits a little longer than I’d wait to have a vet take a look at things. She has, uh, a tendency to cut corners. But Ginny believes in OFA. She OFA’s all her dogs. I know she does.”

OFA:
(noun) Orthopedic Foundation for Animals; (verb) to screen breeding stock for hip dysplasia. Buying a puppy? Oh, no you’re not! Not until you’ve seen the
original
certificates attesting that both parents have cleared either OFA or the University of Pennsylvania’s PennHIP. Approximate cost of full hip-replacement surgery: two thousand dollars. Enough said?

“How many litters does Ginny breed a year?”

“One or two. Two maximum. Really, she’s a very responsible breeder. For all I know, she’s as good as most vets. And there’s nothing wrong with her dogs.”

“Except maybe Bingo,” I couldn’t help saying.

Cam eyed me. “Holly,” she said, “imagine yourself if you’d been raised by Eva Spitteler.”

AT TWO O’CLOCK that afternoon, I was sitting alone at a table in the front window of Doc Grant’s restaurant (“Halfway between the Equator and the North Pole”) looking across Route 4 at the State Liquor Store and the Pine Tree Frosty, and eating two deep-fried fish fillets, a plateful of fries, and a platter of potato skins topped with melted cheese. The fish had come with tartar sauce, the potato skins with sour cream.
To
make sure I wasn’t left starved for carbohydrates or vulnerable to collapse from a deficiency of dietary fat, the waiter brought a little plate on which sat a roll and two pats of butter. I felt happy. The State of Maine abounds in tourist bistros with names evidently inspired by the quasi-artistic productions of children who’ve learned their colors and their vegetables, but haven’t integrated the two spheres of knowledge: The Purple Carrot, The Red Zucchini. Worse, the portions at those places are tiny, and all the food’s steamed over no-salt water by anorectic dietitians from out of state. But Doc Grant’s? Maine, the way life should be.

At a table not far from mine sat Everett Dow, the camp
handyman, and a blue-uniformed guy with a silver badge pinned to his left breast. On the chair next to him rested a Stetson hat. A patch on his shoulder read: Police, Rangeley. Everett was halfway through an order of fried clams with french fries accompanied by a roll and butter, a bag of chips, and a side of mashed. The cop wasn’t eating anything; he was just drinking coffee. In rural Maine, two o’clock in the afternoon is way too late for lunch, practically suppertime. I wondered whether Everett Dow hated olive loaf as much as I did.

Dissatisfaction with the stewards’ lunch was not, however, my excuse for driving into Rangeley; and as for my presence at Doc Grant’s, if I’d been forced to justify it, I’d have given the George Leigh Mallory explanation except that mine wouldn’t have sounded quite so silly as his, Mount Everest having been far away and extremely inconvenient to reach, whereas Doc Grant’s was a fifteen-minute drive from camp—and on street level, too. In fact, I’d always suspected that when Mallory said, “Because it’s
there,”
what he really meant was, “Because it isn’t
here.
” What impelled him to flee his
here
I don’t know. Social entropy, perhaps, order turning to chaos. Maybe he couldn’t face learning yet one more thing he preferred not to know. Maybe he was starting to hate his own ugly perceptions of people he wanted to like.

Take Max McGuire, to whom I’d been favorably predisposed for a variety of disparate and perhaps senseless reasons, the most imposing of which, literally and figuratively, was her splendid and pacific mastiff pup, Cash. Halo effect: shining Cash illuminates Maxine; radiant Elsa glorifies Eric. Were Chesapeake Bay retrievers granted judging privileges, Elsa, who loved swimming even more than Eric did, would never have compromised the position to which the AKC had elevated her, but would have picked her winners strictly on the basis of their merits. An honest dog deserves an honest owner. Cash. Max hadn’t even chosen the mastiff’s name. Even so, it now made me squirm.

“Maxine,” Cam had said as we were leaving the dining room, “has an unfortunate tendency to get herself in trouble over money.”

“With puppy buyers?” I’d asked. It’s easy to do, and I’d been eager to overlook misunderstandings about refundable deposits, stud rights, or complex co-ownership agreements. After all, my editor, Bonnie, vouched for Maxine; the two were old friends. Besides, Max was a real dog person, and if you can’t trust your own, you can’t trust anyone.

“With everyone,” Cam had said. “This CGC thing is typical, charging twenty dollars because the pet people are a captive audience, and they don’t know better. But what she doesn’t take into account is that they’re going to find out because we’re going to tell them, and they’re not going to like it, and the whole thing’s going to backfire. And then this stingy lunch after all the hype about gourmet food. Plus the agility people—”

“What—?”

“The CGC testing’s in the agility area, so they have to move all the obstacles out of the way. They have to shift them around all the time, anyway, so the dogs don’t just run through the same pattern all the time, but they don’t normally have to drag everything out of the way. And those things are heavy! The A-frame weighs a ton, and the dogwalk isn’t all that easy to move. But the main thing is that Max has drafted the agility people to serve as evaluators.”

Canine Good Citizen test evaluators decide whether the dog passes or fails an exercise. Any reasonable person who knows anything about dogs is allowed to be an evaluator, but the task ordinarily belongs to members of the organization sponsoring the test, people who want to make the event a success. It does not usually fall on employees who would otherwise have had time off.

“Why?” I’d asked. “Why the agility people?”

“That’s what they want to know. Apparently, it wasn’t part
of their agreement. Maxine just sort of sprang it on them: ‘And guess what
else
you get to do!’ That kind of thing.”

“Surprise! Extra work.”

“Yes.”

“That’s stupid, at least if Maxine wants them back again next year.”

“Oh, they won’t be back, anyway,” Cam had said. “They’re opening their own agility camp. Don’t mention it. Maxine doesn’t know. Anyway, what’s sad is that it’s all so unnecessary, and as usual, Maxine doesn’t have any idea that she’s doing anything wrong. About anything. The twenty dollars, any of it. Probably she thinks it’s a favor to offer the CGC thing, and I’ll bet anything she has some rationale for why it costs so much. It’s just like that old business with the club funds.”

By persuading Cam that I’d never heard anything about any club funds, I learned another thing I’d have preferred not to know. Years ago, it seemed, when Maxine McGuire had been the treasurer of what I’ll call the Unnamed Kennel Club, she’d been in charge of a certain Special Fund established for a certain Good Purpose that I shall not specify except to say that said Good Purpose was clearly not to offer an alarming number of no-interest loans to the club treasurer, loans that she was eventually discovered to have taken out and had somehow neglected to repay. And then? Should you have the misfortune to dwell outside the world of purebred dogs, perhaps you will be astonished to learn that instead of venting their collective outrage by promptly dragging Max into court and kicking her out of the club, the members of the Unnamed K.C. viewed Max’s behavior as an unfortunate accident, like a puddle left by a puppy that should never have been allowed full run of the house. Incredible? Not at all. Maxine hadn’t harmed a dog or broken an AKC rule. Since she’d done nothing unforgivable, the fancy forgave her. She resigned as treasurer,
but she was still one of us. Freemasonry, I suspect, handles such incidents in the same way.

As I was working my way through the first of the fish fillets, Everett Dow and the cop were talking about the Celtics and the Bruins, and also those inevitable Rangeley topics, fishing and hunting. Neither Everett nor his companion said anything about Maxine McGuire or Waggin’ Tail. I wondered what Everett made of dog camp. I wished he’d say. About the time I finished the fillet, the men stood up to leave. Everett nodded to me. I smiled and nodded back.

For once, I did not clean my plate. I didn’t even come close. My stomach pressed up against my rib cage. I felt disgusted with myself for ordering a lumberjack’s lunch and equally disgusted with myself for leaving most of it. I paid my bill. I left a big tip. I think I must have been trying to persuade the waiter that despite my wastefulness, I was a decent human being.

When I left Doc Grant’s, the sky was the deep slate of an old New England gravestone, the kind that’s carved with a death’s head and a no-nonsense message about earth and bones, and the recurrent warning, as if the buried dead forever spoke:

I scanned the cloud cover for the shape of a skull or an hourglass or maybe the figure of a scythe-wielding Father Time. I wondered whether I might be getting my period. It occurred to me that some of those unknown Colonial tombstone carvers might have been women with PMS or men with an extraordinary capacity for empathy.

I’d left Rowdy in the Bronco, which was illegally parked in the deep shade under the pine trees by the State Liquor Store. The windows were rolled down enough to give him air, the
temperature had dropped about fifteen degrees since the heat of the morning, and he had a bowl of water. Even so, I crossed Route 4 to check on him. Universal dilemma of the real dog person: You leave the dog home, you worry that something will happen to him while you’re out. You take the dog with you, you worry that something will happen to him while he’s alone in the car. You roll the windows down a little, you worry that he won’t get enough air. You roll the windows down a lot, you worry that he’ll somehow get out or that someone will steal him out of his crate. The solution, of course, is to keep the dog at your side twenty-four hours a day every day, but then you worry that your constant presence is making the dog neurotically dependent, and besides, you can’t go anyplace that doesn’t allow dogs, so you can’t go to work or get your hair cut or go to the dentist. And then, of course, you feel guilty because, after all, doesn’t your wonderful dog deserve a better owner than this poverty-stricken, shaggy-headed slob with decayed teeth? Meanwhile, the dog doesn’t worry about anything. Why should he? That’s what he has you for, and for obvious reasons, he trusts you completely.

Rowdy was fine, if a little disappointed that I didn’t immediately let him out of the car, but merely glanced at him and headed for the Pine Tree Frosty, a dog-memorable establishment that Rowdy had apparently failed to remember from previous trips to Rangeley. Or maybe he did remember it. He probably did. How could any dog forget the Fido Special? Cherry ice cream garnished with dog biscuits. Maine: The way life should be. Actually, I didn’t know what had inspired the Fido Special—maybe a beloved pet of the owner, maybe the sled dogs that visited Rangeley for the annual race, maybe the hunting dogs there for bird season.

Fido Special in hand, I returned to the Bronco and, to avoid having the interior splashed with ice cream and dog slobber, led Rowdy to the picnic area at the rear of the Pine Tree Frosty, a collection of tables and benches on the edge of
Haley’s Pond. Habitually fed bits of hot dog and hamburger roll, dozens of mallards clustered around, and as soon as Rowdy had finished his treat, he took a lively interest in them as a possible second dessert. Seated on a bench licking a chocolate ice-cream cone, Everett Dow also watched the ducks and perhaps entertained thoughts similar to Rowdy’s. The reflected light of the pond revealed Everett as weirdly old and young. The lines and hollows in his face looked peculiar without the age spots that should have accompanied them, and the hand wrapped around the ice-cream cone lacked the gnarls of age. Even at the temples, his hair showed no gray, and the light-colored stubble on his cheeks was blond, not silver. With a start, I realized that he couldn’t be much older than I was. I wondered whether I was seeing the aging effect of poverty or perhaps the impact of a long illness. I felt the impulse to approach him. On my way into Rangeley, I’d thought about getting a present for Steve, salmon flies or, better yet, material for fly-tying or, best of all, if I could afford it, the kind of beautifully carved duck decoy meant to attract aesthetically-minded human collectors rather than feathered prey. If anyone in Rangeley made or sold those decoys, Everett would certainly know.