Gone to the Dogs (10 page)

“I think I’d better come up and take a look at him,” I said. “I know him pretty well. If he’s different, I’ll be able to tell.”

“Well, I hate to bother you, and if Dr. Patterson was still around, I wouldn’t. He was the only one I could get who’d come and take a look, and if he knew that the dog wasn’t mine, if it was a stray or something, not one of my boarders, half the time he wouldn’t charge me, either.”

I shouldn’t have been surprised. Haverhill is on the New Hampshire border, as I already knew.

“I used him for years,” Charity went on. “Look, you want me to take the little guy to someone else? I can try and get him to someone, if you want.”

“No, don’t,” I said. “I can leave now. I’ll be there in, what? Forty-five minutes? An hour at the outside. And if it looks serious, I’ll bring him back with me.”

And then? And then hope that I didn’t have to call Rita. If Groucho died while she was away, she’d blame herself. Therapists are like that. Groucho was an old, old dog with a chronic liver problem. As Steve had explained to Rita a few dozen times, the condition wasn’t painful, but it wasn’t curable or predictable, either. Groucho could go on for a while with his usual vague old-dog symptoms—nothing specific except that yellow tinge in his eyes—or he could fail anytime.

As I kept warning Steve, that business about failing
any
time is the wrong thing to say to a therapist, because if there’s one thing that therapists believe, it’s that
any
time is not just any old time. Look at it this way: Einstein said that God does not play dice with the universe, right? According to Rita, God may not, but we do, and what’s more, we play with loaded dice, and worse yet, we not only load them ourselves, but, a lot of the time, against ourselves, too. Thus therapy. Thus Rita.

Route 93 took me to 495, which follows the Merrimack River northeast through a valley dotted with famous birthplaces. Patrician Andover is the home of Phillips Andover Academy and the Raytheon Patriot missile plant, strategic-weapons establishments that mass-produce projectiles to precision-fire at their respective targets, namely, Ivy League admissions committees and enemy rockets. Beyond Andover lies plebeian Lawrence, which gave birth to the Bread and Roses strike and is now the whelping place of Blue Seal Feeds, dam of Gentry Premium Formula Dog Food. Next came Haverhill, ex-Shoe City, U.S.A., now down at the heels, setting of the Archie comics and birthplace of John Greenleaf Whittier, author of “Snowbound” (“The sun that bleak December day …”) as well as that extant canine blizzard himself, my own Rowdy the Arctic Wonder Dog, who was back in Cambridge keeping Kimi company.

Actually, Rowdy was whelped in Bradford, on the south side of the river, and Charity lived north of the city, almost in New Hampshire. You know the area? From 495, I took that recently widened, rough-shouldered road lined with dozens of brave, seedy new business establishments that repair lawn ornaments,
reglaze kitchen appliances, sell giant, splintery wooden salad bowls, and offer lots of other services and goods that nobody wants. The half-finished stores behind the raw parking lots, carless even at Christmastime, reminded me of home, except that many Maine by-the-road retailers are married partners who combine divergent interests in a single weirdly assorted but sometimes prosperous small business. Not far from my father’s place in Owls Head, for instance, there’s a farm with a dangling sign out front that advertises “Worms, Crawlers, Ceramics.” In the summer, the same people also offer homemade bread, live bait, and raspberries, presumably not all layered together in sandwiches. In brief, the route to Charity’s had the familiar look of a privately funded, courageously inventive antipoverty campaign.

On a narrow street off the main drag, I passed a sprawl of corrugated-metal machine shops and found Charity’s house, a white near-Cape with a disfiguring front porch, a couple of misplaced dormers, and a scatter of whitewashed outbuildings: an ex-toolshed, a once-garage, a former guest cottage, and a low, slant-roofed hut originally built, I suspect, for pigs or sheep. The setup reminded me of the clusters of overnight cabins you still see now and then in coastal Maine, except that December draws too few tourists for most proprietors to bother with wreaths and red velvet bows like the ones that adorned Charity’s guest house. Also, of course, her guests consisted entirely of a multitude of my own heavenly host: large and small, longhaired and shorthaired, young and old, fat and thin, yapping and silent dogs. The kennels were a little rough and small, but the runs were paved, and everything looked and smelled clean.

The barking summoned Charity from one of the outbuildings. She looked younger than Hope, maybe thirty-five, and suffered from the dry skin, ragged nails, and undone hair of a woman who grooms her dogs better than she grooms herself (and probably loves them more, too). The top button of her blue-flowered, round-collared blouse was fastened to the second buttonhole, and so forth on down the front. Her jeans were heavy-duty work denim and too big—not baggy, just big—but both knees had ripped anyway. She greeted me, then suddenly self-conscious, stooped to tie an undone lace on her mud-stained Nikes.

“Now you’ll think I’ve been leaving Groucho all alone,” said Charity as she hung an industrial-size pooper-scooper on a hook near the back door of the house. “But some of them don’t like to soil their pens, like that little lady there.” She pointed to one of the runs attached to the refurbished garage. A rather heavy, shepherdlike golden-yellow bitch watched us wide-eyed, evidently the one Hope had mentioned, the one she’d said looked like John’s dog, Bear. “They aren’t used to it,” Charity continued, “and it’s not fair, is it? A house pet doesn’t want to dirty his own quarters. So I take them out, and then I’ve got to scoop up after them. I’d take her in the house with me, but I don’t have the room, and I didn’t want them pestering Groucho, not now. And, you know, I did tell Rita, he’s not my only dog, and I do grooming, too, besides boarding and my sewing. Well, come in and see what you think.”

Green and purple must have been that winter’s colors in dog wear. Glazed cotton swatches of kelly and deep rose violet lay on the kitchen table. Most of
the other surfaces were stacked with cheerful piles of miniature parkas and bright jackets. Groucho’s pillow-lined wicker basket rested on the floor near the table; Charity must have been keeping him at her feet while she worked. As she’d said, he was asleep, his long, fragile, loose-skinned body slightly curled, his short legs limp, his head immobile. I knelt down and lightly held an ear and cheek to his chest. Wirehaired and longhaired dachshunds need grooming, but smooth dachshunds like Groucho, the shorthaired ones you’re apt to see on the street, usually remain shiny and odorless. Except in unusual circumstances—a wallow in mud, an encounter with a skunk—they don’t even need brushing and bathing. Now, though, Groucho had the musky, thick odor of an old, old dog. But he was still breathing.

“Groucho?” I whispered. “Groucho, wake up! Groucho?” He looked so weak that I was almost afraid to touch him again. I put a hand on his head and lightly stroked him. I raised my voice a little. “Groucho? Can you hear me?”

His heavy, yellow-tinged eyes slowly opened. Rita, I might add, had bought Groucho as a pet-quality dachshund. With his thickish hair and bowlegs, he’d never had the makings of a show dog, but his keen sight, acute hearing, and sharp sense of smell, plus his bold disposition, were exactly what’s wanted in a small breed meant to hunt big adversaries.
Dachs hund
. Badger dog. Until chronic disease had dulled his perception, his effervescent red-brown eyes had been his best feature, and Groucho himself had been a vivacious little sparkler. Stuporous and probably sightless, his drooping eyes now stared blankly.

I got to my feet. “I’ll take him,” I told Charity.
“He probably needs to be on intravenous something or other. At least they can get some food into him that way. He might pull out of it.”

In the Bronco on the way back to Cambridge, through Lawrence, Andover, Tewksbury, Wilmington, and Woburn, I kept giving Groucho orders that he couldn’t have obeyed even if Rita had ever civilized him. I didn’t yell at him, of course. Like a beginning handler begging a pup not to get up on the long down, I pleaded softly. “Don’t you dare die before Rita gets home! Just hang on, and we’ll get you pumped full of medicine. You don’t have to wake up, and you don’t have to get healthy. You just have to stay alive. Got that?”

As we approached Boston on 93, I was tempted to head straight into the city and cut across to Angell Memorial, but we were closer to Cambridge than we were to South Huntington Avenue. Steve would be back from Minneapolis late that evening, but, in the meantime, if he trusted his practice to Lee Miner, I should respect that trust; the impulse to run to Angell felt disloyal. I squelched it.

Before long, I was glad I had. When I hustled Rita’s little withered dog into the waiting room, Lorraine and Rhonda didn’t ask who we were or demand my Visa or MasterCard. I didn’t have to explain that this was an emergency. In fact, I’m not sure that any of us spoke a word. While Lorraine was pulling Groucho’s chart, Rhonda held open the swinging door to the back of the clinic, then the door to an exam room, and waved me in. Almost as soon as I’d settled Groucho’s bed on the exam table, Lee Miner appeared and checked both Groucho and his chart. For a few seconds, I was afraid Miner would dither
around memorizing Groucho’s medical history, but he scanned the record and examined the limp, dozing little dog pretty quickly. While Miner washed his hands, I told him that Groucho had refused food and water today and that he seemed much worse than I’d ever seen him before, almost comatose.

“Don’t worry about him,” Miner told me. “He’ll be fine.”

Then, although I felt that I should stay with Groucho, Miner took him away. I was standing in the exam room wondering whether to insist on special privileges when Lorraine came in. She has a sturdy, compact body and round everything, and she keeps her long, somewhat frizzy brown-gray hair clamped to the back of her neck in a big leather fastener. Even if she wore makeup, I suspect that her face would have a bare, scrubbed look.

“You okay?” she asked.

“No,” I said. “Steve warned me this might happen. Rita knew, really. She knew that it could happen any time. And Steve keeps saying this liver thing is not painful.”

“It really isn’t, you know,” said Lorraine. Her official title is veterinary technician, I think, but she’s Steve’s administrator, business manager, and chief clinical assistant. She worked for Dr. Draper before Steve took over the practice a few years ago, and she’s had lots of clinical experience. Also, she does speedy, neat, legible ID tattoos on dogs and artistic ones on her friends, or so I’ve heard, but I think the people part is illegal, so don’t pass that on.

“Lorraine,” I said, “I have to call Rita. If she isn’t here when—”

“Hey, give it a few hours,” Lorraine said. “They
can pull out of it sometimes. At least wait until you have something to tell her. Dr. Miner’ll go over it with you.”

She still called Steve “Dr. Delaney,” too, and he called her “Lorraine.” The inequity bothered only me, but the crisis with Groucho made me understand it. If a magical honorific could have magnified Miner’s power over death, I’d’ve been happy to call him Dr. God.

“Lorraine, does he know what the hell he’s doing?” I asked.

“Yes,” she said. “He really does. Dr. Miner can be sort of a cold fish, but he loves animals, and he’s got the patience of Job. He’s really very thorough. He’ll come and talk to you about him. He’s pretty good at that. It may take him a while, though.”

As Lorraine had predicted, Lee Miner was good about explaining Groucho’s condition, not as good as Steve is at that kind of thing, of course, but not bad, and he was warmer and gentler than I’d expected. We both stood leaning against the counters in one of the back rooms of the clinic, a cabinet-lined cubbyhole where Steve, or perhaps I should say Lorraine, keeps instruments, cotton swabs, gauze, tape, boxes of latex exam gloves, disposable hypodermics, medications that don’t require refrigeration, and other veterinary paraphernalia.

“But he
is
still alive,” I said.

Lee nodded. “There are things we’re doing. There’s a medication we use, Lactulose, and antibiotics.” He spoke with quiet, confident authority.

“He belongs to one of my best friends,” I said. “She’s out of town.”

“Lorraine said.”

“But I know she’d want you to do everything you can, if you’re sure there’s no pain.”

“Of course.” To my amazement, he moved next to me, put a bony arm around my shoulders, and gave a paternal squeeze.

I felt guilty about leaving Groucho, but Lee Miner, Lorraine, Rhonda, and the rest of Steve’s staff could do more for him than I could, and Rowdy and Kimi needed to be fed and taken out. They greeted the sound of the Bronco so enthusiastically that I had to shove against a hundred and sixty pounds of thrilled malamute to open the kitchen door. Malamutes, of course, are ungodly strong, and when two of them wiggle, dash around, bump against you, and scour you with their tongues, you can feel like a minisub-compact trapped on the conveyor belt of an outsize automatic car wash designed to lather moving vans. I staggered to my feet, held both arms straight out from my shoulders, braced myself, and said, “Dogs, up!” Well, I wish you could see this trick, which wasn’t all that easy to teach. Rowdy learned immediately to rise gently and rest his forepaws on my left arm, but it took a while to convince Kimi to put her feet on my right arm and not to throw her weight on me or dig in her nails. Once she got it, though, the performance looked spectacular.

The dogs got a minute in my fenced yard, then raced each other back inside, where I tied Kimi at one end of the kitchen, Rowdy at the other, and gave
Kimi a helping of Science Diet Maintenance. Rowdy, the would-be world’s first gray-furred sumo wrestler, got a skimpy portion of Iams Light. Ten seconds later, I picked up the empty bowls and unleashed the dogs.

By the way, if you’re worried, scared, or sad, does a fish care? And if you force your cat to go on long antidepressant walks, be honest: He hates it, doesn’t he? And with a person, it always all depends. But a dog? Two Alaskan malamutes? On a cold December day? At the sight of my tattered navy blue Maine warden’s parka and their Christmas-red leashes, Kimi and Rowdy were all smiles and prance, even when I told them about Groucho. In brief, late that afternoon when I should have been phoning everyone who’d ever known the missing Oscar Patterson, forcing myself on his pregnant common-law presumed widow, penning
Dog’s Life’s
welcome to the Chinese crested, and otherwise earning our daily kibble, we went for a walk.