Gone to the Dogs (19 page)

Steve looked skeptical. “And you also got some kind of guarantee out of him that he’s not going to show up later and—”

“Okay! For all I know, he’s the one Lee Miner really heard with Patterson. It’s possible that the guy he heard was Brenner, not Bourque.”

A young couple with the strained, educated eyes of graduate students rose from their seats on a length of high granite curbstone. Steve and I took their places. They strolled toward WordsWorth. After watching the morris dancers, they’d browse for books and then go for espresso and bend their heads together in ardent dispute about Heidegger. Another wild night in Harvard Square.

“What’s his voice like?” Steve asked.

“Brenner’s? There’s nothing special about it, at least that I noticed. Or about John’s, either. Cliff Bourque’s. I still half feel as if he’s two people. Anyway, if you heard them one right after the other, you’d probably notice some big difference, but they both have kind of ordinary voices, not deep, not high,
nothing that you couldn’t miss. And their accents are sort of the same, not Boston, but Massachusetts, southern New Hampshire, that kind of thing. Speaking of Bourque, maybe there’s something you can straighten out. I’m not sure what was wrong with the dog.”

Steve smiled a little. “A couple of minutes ago, I was the guy who wants to see the animal.”

“Yeah, but, failing that, you can at least take a better guess than I can.”

“The ultimate tribute,” he said. “ ‘The man can even take a better guess than I can myself!’ ”

“I didn’t mean it like that. Anyway, here’s the story. This is a Chinook bitch. She’s pregnant. She starts retching, but she doesn’t vomit. The wife has just read some article about bloat, and she’s scared, but her husband, Cliff, thinks it isn’t bloat, because, except for the retching, she doesn’t look all that sick. So?”

“So the wife is right. Especially with a large dog, you pursue it as bloat.”

“That’s what she said that Lee Miner said.”

“Lee was right.”

“But that doesn’t mean it
was
bloat. It just means that the safe thing to do is assume that’s what it is.”

“Because if it is, and if you don’t treat it real quick, you’ll lose the dog.”

“Soon?”

“Within a few hours. But, look, what you’re talking about is two things. One is gastric dilatation, and the other is volvulus. G.D.V. syndrome. People say ‘bloat,’ but all that means is the dilatation. The abdomen’s distended because the stomach’s full of something. Food, water, gas. Something. Dilatation with
volvulus means torsion. The stomach’s also twisted. Okay? So there’s pressure on the vena cava, which means that no blood’s getting to the heart.”

“So the husband is right, too, in a way,” I said.

“You can’t assume—”

“Okay! I understand. But, look, if you get a dog brought in and it really is G.D.V. syndrome, what do you expect? Ordinarily? What do you usually have to do?”

“Decompress the stomach. And, yeah, treat the dog for shock. What did this retching look like? Was it like gagging or—”

“I don’t know. I wasn’t there, either. But Anneliese says that the dog hadn’t got into any food and overeaten or something like that. Oh, and she says she thought the abdomen was distended, but he didn’t.”

“Anything else they noticed?”

“No. Except that the other dogs were fine. And they stayed fine. So obviously, it wasn’t something contagious, and it wasn’t something they’d all got into, you know, something rotten they’d all eaten or whatever. So probably it was bloat.”

“Isn’t that what Miner …?”

“But he wasn’t the one, was he?” I said. “That’s what Jackie told you, right? Patterson barged in and took over before Miner’d started. Patterson told Miner to get out, he’d take care of it himself. And Miner did. He left. And the next day, the dog was dead. And Patterson was gone, of course. Besides, Geri thinks Patterson was the one taking care of the dog, and she says that when Patterson lost Bourque’s dog, both of them would’ve been really broken up. They’d’ve had a drink together and cried in each other’s beer or something like that.”

“Did Lee examine the body?”

“I guess so,” I said. “Hey, this jingling is starting to hurt my ears, and I’m getting cold. We should’ve worn better clothes. We could’ve gone to Harvest and sat at the bar.”

“They won’t kick us out.”

“There’s a line a mile long at the X-Press machine, and I don’t have any money. Do you?”

He slipped his wallet out of the back pocket of his jeans, and while he was opening it and searching for bills, I kept watching his jeans. Our relationship is really very simple.

“Maybe we should go home,” I said.

“If we stick to beer, I’ve got enough,” he said. It kills him to use credit cards.

I shook my head. “No. If we show up at Harvest in kennel clothes, we’ll have to do something to redeem ourselves. Mead.”

Tourists won’t pay for dead history anymore. Visit Old Ironsides or Plimoth Plantation, and you’ll find scads of college students in colonial costume who’ve been coached to answer your questions in stilted dialect. Exhibits of living history, they’re called, these unfortunate Henry David Thoreaus who hoe away summer vacation in the steamy bean fields of tourism, these saddle-sore Paul Reveres whose professional daytime cries that the British are coming must turn into heartfelt private midnight pleas that the Redcoats would finally arrive.

On Brattle Street in Cambridge, no sinewy-handed, brawny-armed undergraduate interprets Longfellow’s village smithy, but only a few steps from where the spreading chestnut tree stood, the would-be future-famous daily portray themselves. Harvest is hence no mere restaurant and bar, but a vital museum of local culture obligated to display its animate artifacts in their natural setting. When the proprietors of lesser dining and drinking establishments ripped down the Marimekko fabric, tore up the butcher block, composted the spider plants, and tinted the all-white everything else shell pink and pale gray, the wise curators of Harvest had the foresight
to leave fashion-pandering to mere restaurateurs. Fads be damned. The Marimekko stayed.

I don’t know why I worried about our jeans and T-shirts, which were indistinguishable from those of several people at the bar, although the other patrons had doubtless paid dearly to have theirs prefaded, shredded, and ripped by the Banana Republic instead of waiting to have them wrecked gratis by Canine Enterprises. A distinguished-looking gentleman in black tie was leaning across a little table to whisper in the ear of a handsome woman wearing a heavily embroidered deep-blue velvet dress, a flower-trimmed straw hat, and wooden clogs with two-inch soles, probably the traditional sixteenth-century festival costume of some long-defunct European principality.

Seated alone at a table for four, Rita was the least Cantabrigian-looking person there, which is to say that she’d done her face, hair, and nails and was wearing a Lord and Taylor Christmas-red dress with matching pumps. As if to announce where she belonged, she was drinking a Manhattan.

“This is going to sound very sour,” she warned us when we’d seated ourselves at her table, “but this is Holly’s fault. The man who was supposed to meet me here—exactly fifty-five minutes ago—is one of your single dog owners.” I am the one who told her about the dating service, but its members are not, of course,
mine
. “What the hell,” she added morosely. “I don’t even qualify anymore. I’m here under false pretenses. Maybe he intuited that I wasn’t on the up-and-up.”

“Of course you are,” I said emphatically. “He probably just got lost or something.”

“Let him stay that way,” she said.

As Steve told Rita, the man was obviously a fool.
Even so, as if to prove herself a wonderful person and generous friend, she refused to let us order beer and insisted on paying for our brandy.

“So, Rita, what kind of dog does he have?” I asked, mostly in the hope that the no-show’s breed would be accident- or illness-prone and hence explain his absence.

“Something I’ve never heard of,” she said. “A Chinese something.”

Steve began offering suggestions. “Chow. Shar Pei. Pekingese.”

Rita shook her head and ordered another Manhattan.

“Are you sure it isn’t Japanese?” I asked. “An akita! I’ll bet that’s what it is.”

Akitas aren’t clumsy or sickly. They’re big, tough, and interesting. They promise well of their owners. If the guy had one, I hoped he’d finally arrive.

“No,” Rita said. “It was a Chinese something.”

“Crested,” I said reluctantly.

“A Chinese crested! That’s it!” Rita said.

Steve’s normal expression is serious, and he never chokes. I tried to hide the smirk on my face by leaning over to thump his back, but Rita is hard to divert.

“Okay, both of you,” she said severely.

“It’s a small dog,” I said. “It’s just been recognized by the AKC.”

Steve pulled himself together and gave Rita a factual description of the breed and a technical explanation of why the hairless variety tends to lack the full dentition possessed by powderpuffs.

When Steve had finished, Rita said, “I don’t see what’s so bad about it. They sound cute.”

“Oh, they are,” I said.

Rita sounded defensive. “So what do you want? Someone who’s got, what? A giant attack dog?”

“I was hoping for an Airedale,” I said, not that there’s anything wrong with Airedales, either. Far from it.

“Yeah, any kind of terrier,” Steve said. “It doesn’t have to be large. A Cairn, a Norwich.”

“A Scottie!” I said.

Steve looked as if I’d gone mad. “Not …?”

“Oh, God, of course not,” I said. “Rita wouldn’t like him at all. Besides, Willie’s gone. She took Willie with her.” After a few seconds I added, “Didn’t she?”

“No,” Steve said.

“That’s impossible!”

“Would you mind …?” Rita said.

Steve and I apologized and filled her in.

“Hey, Steve,” I said. “If Jackie didn’t … I don’t understand. When she left, where did she go?”

He said he didn’t know. He’d been out of town.

“Well,” I said, “it’s one more thing that doesn’t fit with Geri’s theory.” Then I had to stop and tell Rita about Oscar Patterson, Geri Driscoll, Geri’s Kerouac theory, and what I assumed to be Geri’s fear that Patterson had left her for Jackie Miner. “Actually,” I continued, “you’d think that would be one of the major benefits of leaving your husband for another vet: You’d be more or less guaranteed that you could take your dog.”

“That happens not to be most people’s major consideration,” Rita said.

“Rita, you didn’t know Jackie,” I said. “If you had, you’d realize that the whole idea is completely off base. It’s practically a joke. If there’s one place Jackie Miner isn’t, it’s on some bohemian cross-country
trip. Her idea of being on the road is driving to the nearest upscale shopping mall. Not that I didn’t like her. I did. But, Jesus, I never thought she’d leave Willie, either. Jesus. I can’t believe it. I never thought she was that kind of person at all. I mean, if she’d do that, she’d do practically anything. Steve, has anyone run into her since she left? Lorraine? Pete?”

“No,” he said, “but don’t think they haven’t been looking.” As the last word left his lips, his face paled.

“Are you all right?” Rita asked him.

“No,” he said as he stood up.

Therapists have a lot of practice in making their voices convey nonjudgmental interest. “Are you going to be sick?” she asked.

He didn’t hang around long enough to answer.

When he’d dashed off, Rita said, “Don’t you want to go with him?”

“To the men’s room?”

“He didn’t go there. He went outside.”

“He did? Maybe he … This is totally unlike him. He’s never sick.” The practice of veterinary medicine requires a strong constitution and, in particular, a stomach that will take anything. I’d actually once watched Steve eat curried shrimp on rice while he read a color-photo-illustrated journal article about how to treat maggot-infested wounds. He didn’t so much as burp.

“Anyway, he hates having people hover,” I added.

“He doesn’t take very good care of himself,” Rita said. “You know, maybe I’ll give him my membership in the Mount Auburn Club. I wonder if I can do that.”

The Mount Auburn Club has tennis courts, a
pool, exercise machines, sauna, steam, and all the rest. Two days after Rita joined, she was swimming laps and accidentally frog-kicked a guy who turned out to be one of her patients. When she went to the steam room to meditate about whether she’d unconsciously recognized him and kicked out her repressed impulses, two of her women patients walked in and found her lying there in the mist, naked and guilty. She’s never returned.

“Or maybe you’d like it?” she offered.

“Thank you. That’s really generous. But why don’t you just wear something in the steam room? Just wrap a towel around yourself.”

She shook her head knowingly.

“Or, look,” I said. “You’re the one who’s in charge. The next time one of them walks in naked, just tell her to get dressed. Or you could use the sauna instead.”

She lowered her voice. “They’re in there, too.” She made them sound like cockroaches: in the kitchen and in the bathroom, too. “Sometimes it feels like they’re everywhere. There’s one in here now.”

I looked around.

“No,” she said. “In the dining room.”

Rita maintains that
paranoid
doesn’t mean what people think it means, but she was beginning to make me uneasy. “Speaking of your profession,” I said, “what do you know about Vietnam veterans?”

“What everybody else knows. I’ve read a little bit about Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. That’s about all. Why?”

I told her Anneliese’s story about Cliff Bourque. When I’d finished, I asked, “So, does that make sense?”

“I guess so. I don’t know him, of course, but there are a couple of things that strike me.”

“Such as?”

“Some of the words you’re using. Phrases. I don’t know whose they are, but take ‘recognizing the breed.’ You said that. Did she?”

“I think so.”

“I wonder if it’s his. If it is … He saw the same kind of dog he’d seen in Vietnam, and he ‘recognized the breed’? To me, that connotes something in addition to breed of dog. It’s also, you know, special breed? The Vietnam vet. Himself. Himself as a Vietnam veteran. Member of a special breed.”