Black Ribbon (20 page)

Phyllis bent down and needlessly fiddled with Nigel’s collar. As an obedience judge, Phyllis Abbott was not charged with policing CGC tests. Even so, as my column-in-progress had begun to point out, judges represent the AKC itself and the entire sport of dogs. If Maxine McGuire wanted to keep her campers happy by declaring all “good dogs,” whatever that meant, Canine Good Citizens, Phyllis Abbott didn’t want to hear about it. When Phyllis stood up, I caught her eye and said, “The dogs at camp are a lot better behaved than the average dog, and the owners are responsible, or they wouldn’t be here. And there’s probably a lot of self-selection. People probably wouldn’t have paid the twenty dollars unless they were fairly sure that their dogs would pass.”

“You want to see Lucky’s ribbon?” Joy asked. “Craig! Craig! Where’s Lucky’s ribbon?”

A Nikon dangling from a strap around his neck, Craig was seated on the rough grass, ready, I assumed, to take a picture of Lucky enjoying flyball. Beckoned by his wife, he reached into the pocket of what looked like a government-issue tan windbreaker and produced a green ribbon.

Joy motioned to Craig to bring it to her. Up close, the dark green satiny strip of fabric looked all too familiar. AKC rules about ribbons, prizes, and trophies are clear and rigid. In conformation, dark green means a special prize; in obedience, it’s the color of the ribbon awarded to every dog that qualifies. Groups sponsoring CGC tests were, I knew, allowed to give ribbons to dogs that passed. I was quite sure, however, that dark green was not a permissible color, and I was positive that CGC ribbons were not supposed to display the seal of the American Kennel Club. But there it was, smack in the center of the ribbon: three concentric circles, the words
American
Kennel Club
curving around the top of the outer circle, a star fore and aft, the word
Incorporated
underneath; then the circle of little dots; and within the solid inner circle—some mystical significance there, perhaps?—the letters
A K C.
No big deal? Wrong.
Imprimatur:
Let it be printed, the statement at the beginning of books approved by the Roman Catholic Church. Well, the AKC seal is the imprimatur of the fancy, and the AKC is about as happy to see it used without permission as the Pope would be to have the Church’s imprimatur casually placed on the masthead of every issue of
Dog’s Life
, not that there’s anything sacrilegious about
Dog’s Life
—for all I know, the Pope may even subscribe—any more than there’s anything objectionable about CGC tests. But just as the Pope can’t check out every issue of
Dog’s Life
before it’s published, the AKC can’t send a rep to every CGC test; therefore, no imprimatur and no AKC seal.

Appropriately enough, Phyllis Abbott rolled her eyes toward heaven—or maybe toward 51 Madison Avenue. With admirable grace, she murmured, for my ears only, “I am
not
seeing that.” She cleared her throat. “I am not looking.”

I complied with what I understood as Judge Abbott’s request. “Very nice,” I told Joy. I pointed out that she was next in line. Taking the green ribbon from his wife, Craig hurried away, hunkered down a few yards from the flyball box, and raised the camera to his eye. The flyball instructor in charge of our group—Betsy, her name was, a wiry woman with weathered skin and deep laugh lines—loaded the apparatus with a tennis ball. With Betsy’s help, Joy succeeded in getting Lucky to put his paws on the pedal, but each time the tennis ball flew through the air, the little fellow acted more startled than pleased. At the flyball box to our left, the one manned by Janet, our drill team instructor, Elsa the Chesapeake leaped after a ball, and Eric Grimaldi gave a shout of pleasure. “Good girl, Elsa! Good girl!”

“Let her keep it,” Janet advised him. “It’s her prize. For now, just let her keep it.”

Prancing at the end of her lead, the triumphant Elsa, her catch in her mouth, led Eric to the end of the line. They wouldn’t have long to wait. Mainly because of Eva Spitteler’s presence, I suspected, their group was small.

While I’d been watching Elsa and preventing Rowdy from finding out whether she’d share that tennis ball with him, Phyllis and Nigel had taken their turn, with what success I don’t know.

“And now the malamute!” Betsy called. “Let’s see what the malamute can do! What his name? Rowdy? Bring Rowdy up here. All you want to do for right now is get him to get those big paws down here.” She pointed to the carpeted pedal that ran across the front of the box. “Can you get him to jump? Bounce around? All we’re after now is just getting him to hit it by accident.”

Persuading a malamute to clown around isn’t exactly difficult. With the big plastic handle of the retractable lead in one hand, I had a little trouble clapping my hands, but my effort, in combination with a lot of excited chitchat, got Rowdy going, and within a few seconds, his forepaws had landed on the pedal and sent a ball flying out of the back of the machine. Clowning around is a virtually universal passion in the breed; retrieving isn’t. With Rowdy and Kimi, I’d lucked out. Besides, a lifetime with golden retrievers had trained me to expect demonic fetching from all dogs, and, in part, Rowdy and Kimi had done what I’d expected. When the tennis ball flew, Rowdy took a second to notice it, but then zoomed after it. After a late start, he failed to catch it in midair, but happily snapped it up as it rolled across the grass. When I led Rowdy back to the flyball box and made a big happy fuss that caused him accidentally to whack the pedal, he caught the ball before it hit the ground. Our turn was up. Like Elsa, Rowdy kept the
ball he’d caught, and like her, he paraded back to the end of our queue with his prize in his jaws.

As it happens, I have a photograph taken at the exact moment that Rowdy and I took our place at the end of the line. Craig, who took the picture, must have stepped far back to snap it. On the right, Betsy is loading the arm of the flyball box with a tennis ball. Jacob, first in line, is peering at Michael, who is pointing at the box. Michael’s mouth is open; he is talking to his dog, trying to entice Jacob toward the pedal. Some of the handlers in back of them are people I remember. Mary wears a cobalt blue Waggin’ Tail sweatshirt; Carole, a red anorak. The husband and wife with the English setters are there, the dogs even more handsome in the photograph than in my memory. Baskerville is yawning. Joy has on a fuzzy pink jacket, and adorning her blond curls is a matching pink bow suitable for a child. She kneels down, one arm around Lucky, her hand under the dog’s chin to tilt it toward the camera. She is posing; the odd smile on her half-open mouth suggests that Craig may have caught her as she was uttering
cheese
or
pickles
or one of those other words superstitiously believed to confer temporary photogenicity on the pronouncer. Joy does not, however, need to order lunch to look lovely; in the eye of the lens, Craig’s eye, she radiates a bride’s beauty. Phyllis Abbott’s face is turned away, and Joy’s body completely blocks the camera’s view of Nigel. At the end of the line, at the extreme left of the picture, I am grinning foolishly at Rowdy, who has noticed the camera. Oblivious to the unfortunate state of his coat, he has spontaneously stacked himself for the show ring. As if to brag of his recent accomplishment, he holds his head high and prominently displays the tennis ball in his mouth. My hair looks even worse than Rowdy’s coat. His display of pride is unabashed, deliberate. Mine is unintended and entirely unself-conscious. Indeed, I am conscious only of Rowdy and of a thought that is crossing my mind—an unusual thought to cross the mind of any writer, I might add—the
thought that—wow!—my editor was right. Bonnie’s prediction was merely that and not a calculated injunction after all: I do love camp. And Rowdy loves it even more than I do. We are happy. We miss what the camera saw. Toward the right of the photograph, in the background, a big-boned yellow Lab leaps for a ball.

But the camera does not see all. Or does it? In the picture, Bingo seems to be off lead. He was not. But he might as well have been. A Labrador retriever, young and healthy, if rather beefy, went hard after the ball. And then? I am forced to reconstruct. Eager to let Bingo follow the ball, Eva let him pull out the cord of the retractable lead. Too unfit or too lazy to keep up with her athletic dog, she remained where she was as the cord fed out. By the time I looked, Bingo was twenty feet away from her. At that point, I think, Eva finally pressed the trigger on the plastic handle and hit the little gadget that locks the retracting mechanism in place. His lead suddenly tight, Bingo gave a jolt, then a lunge that tore the handle out of Eva’s hands. With its mechanism locked to prevent the cord from retracting, the whole device, handle and twenty feet of thin cord, dragged after Bingo as he began what he must have meant as a game of catch-me-if-you-can. Glancing back at Eva, the tennis ball still in his mouth, he sped headlong and unseeing toward the line of experienced flyball dogs. That he collided with another Lab, Wiz, and with his own breeder, Ginny Garabedian, was a simple accident. Bingo, I am convinced, never intended to knock Ginny to the ground. But mounting Wiz was no accident. Although a gentle, docile creature, the chocolate Lab was nonetheless a female not in season and thus a lady unconditionally unreceptive to the amorous advances of any male. Besides, poor Wiz was terrified. Much smaller than Bingo, unexpectedly jumped, Wiz did her best to fight him off. Clambering to her feet, her face smeared with dirt, Ginny drew on the strength conferred by decades of training, handling, showing, breeding, and just plain bossing
around Labrador retrievers. By then, I’d joined the crowd that surrounded the melee. Like almost everyone else who witnessed Ginny’s rescue of Wiz, I had the impression that her principal weapon was a tone of voice that brooked no argument. When the crowd around her cleared, Ginny had Bingo sitting really quite nicely at her left side. Having somehow caught hold of the plastic handle of his lead, she held it firmly, the cord now shortened to a few feet. On what looked like a reliable down-stay a yard or so away, Wiz eyed Ginny with well-earned trust.

Making her way through the curious handlers and excited dogs, Eva Spitteler approached Ginny. She reached out for Bingo’s lead.

“Sorry about that,” Eva blithely told Ginny. “But Bingo just
loves
the girls.”

ONE LEAN ELBOW cocked on the bar, Ginny Garabedian spoke firmly: “A Bombay martini straight up with a twist of peel.” The spinsterish braid coiled around her head suggested the occasional indulgence in a drop of sweet sherry as a daring alternative to tea. A real bartender wouldn’t have blinked. This fellow gaped. I hoped that he stayed away from high-stakes poker.

Impatient, Ginny demanded, “You
do
have Bombay gin?”

“I think so,” the bartender stammered. Recovering, he offered to check. I wanted to inform him that Ginny had outlived five husbands.

“Please do that,” Ginny said. “If not, Beefeater’s will do. And that’s
straight up
with a
twist.”

I ordered a drink I didn’t want, a Johnnie Walker Black on the rocks. I wondered why I’d done it. Rita, my therapist friend and tenant, owns so many books that I sometimes wonder how her floor and my ceiling support them. In Cambridge, though, owning a trillion pounds of books is so typical that the building code probably has some special provision
designed to protect the citizenry from what would otherwise be daily episodes of lower-floor dwellers being buried like avalanche victims under the descending libraries of their upstairs neighbors. Anyway, I haven’t read many of Rita’s books, but sometimes their titles stick with me. The one I thought of was called
The Group Mind.
Maybe it dealt with this compulsion to order Scotch when all I wanted was a glass of red wine.

When the drinks arrived, we carried them to a little table in a corner of what the resort billed as “The Pub,” a room off the big main hall furnished with rustic-looking Rangeley-style furniture, tables and chairs made of white birch with the peeling bark left on. As Ginny set her glass on our table, she said, “I hardly ever drink martinis, but I am so mad I could spit.” Without so much as a
cheers
, she took a greedy sip, licked her lips, and forcibly exhaled. “Harry had Saint Bernards. He never put barrels around their necks, naturally, but if he had, this is what would’ve been in them. That’s why my kennels are so big, because a lot of them, Harry built for his dogs.”

I’d never seen Ginny with any breed but a Lab. After Harry’s death, what had she done with the Saint Bernards that had failed to tote Bombay gin? I didn’t ask. I tasted my Johnnie Walker. One real slug and I’d be asking Ginny how many litters she bred a year and whether she ever permitted visitors to see the kennels where Harry’s Saints had trod.

Before I had a chance to ask anything, Ginny transferred her glass to her left hand, made a tight little fist with her right, and punched the air. “Eva Spitteler is not allowed to breed that dog without my written permission. It’s right there in my contract.”

Reputable breeders have what always strikes me as a touching faith in the power of signed contracts to regulate the behavior of puppy buyers. Breeders rewrite those contracts, add new clauses, and explain all the provisions to all their puppy buyers. According to the typical contract, the buyer promises to take great care of the dog, swears to get the breeder’s permission
before breeding the dog, or, in the case of pet-quality puppies, promises to have the pup spayed or neutered. If the owner ever decides to get rid of the dog, the animal returns to the breeder. A few breeders add special requirements: The dog lives in the house, and once a week, he has a bath and gets his nails trimmed. The hitch? Envision the diligent breeder who, in the course of her weekly visits to the homes of every puppy she’s ever sold, is shocked to discover that whereas all her other buyers have been following her contract to the letter, young Fido’s owners have reneged on the promise to trim his nails and, indeed, report themselves unable to wield the trimmers themselves and unwilling to pay a groomer to do so. Can you hear it in court? Moral: A contract is no better than the breeder’s ability to monitor and enforce it. So what’s a breeder to do? About nail trimming, nothing. About breeding?