Gone to the Dogs (2 page)

I shoved Rowdy backward into the Bronco, slammed the tailgate, then stepped toward the traffic, as camouflaged in my black jersey and navy jeans as Kimi was in her dark wolf gray. Both of us blended invisibly into the twilight. Some of the cars speeding by had their headlights on. Kimi’s full mask—her black cap and goggles and the black bar down her muzzle—absorbed the light and left her nearly invisible as she pranced back and forth along the white line separating the two lanes of dog-crushing metal speeding southward from the two lanes heading north. The cars and vans shot by her like a barrage of bullets from a pair of double barrels aimed at each other. My beautiful dog capered in the cross fire.

Seconds later, no longer playful, she began to watch for a break. Taller and wiser, I saw none, but stood helpless, almost in the street, my heart thudding painfully, the whoosh and roar of the traffic sucking at my clothes. I desperately needed to guide Kimi, but what could I shout to her?
Stay!
And wait to be hit?
Kimi, come!
And be killed instantly? Waving my arms, I screamed to the passing drivers: “Stop!” Then desperately, over and over, “Help me! Stop! Please stop!” A dark van veered toward me. The driver leaned on his horn.

In the two lanes close to me, the traffic was even heavier than on the far side, but slower. A Mercedes doing a good forty or fifty in this thirty-mile zone missed Kimi by inches, and in the lights of a demon-driven Saab, I saw on her pretty, gutsy face an expression I’d almost never seen there before: the flash of raw fear. No longer prancing, she paced slowly, ready to bolt. I knew what would follow: panic, a dash, the squeal of brakes, and the horror of metal on flesh, Kimi in agony, maimed, dead, and all of it my fault,
the inevitable result of my vain need to doll up creatures born perfect.

Then a black pickup with a cheery, red-ribboned wreath on the front grille headed straight for Kimi, and I really lost it, shrieking and bellowing. As I was about to hurl myself through the traffic, a stranger appeared on the opposite side of the street, dodged between a Volvo wagon and a battered Chevy sedan, raised a fist toward a delivery truck, dashed, leapt, and miraculously ended up in the center of those death rows of traffic with Kimi’s leash in one hand and the other wrapped protectively around her hindquarters. Light-clothed, towering over the cars, he succeeded where I’d failed, commanding the traffic to a brief halt, leading her safely to me. I grabbed the dense, soft fur around Kimi’s neck, rubbed gently, and felt beneath her coat for the unbroken bone of her skull.

Her tail wagged, and her eyes smiled.

I’m no good at sappy speeches. “Jesus,” I said to the man. “Who are you?”

Remember how
The Lone Ranger
always ended? That’s how I felt, except that Kimi was the one with the black mask, unless a beard counts. This guy’s was dark, like his hair, and scissored short, mustache and all, not the usual Cambridge professorial Vincent Price pointed-chin type or a thick, full mass of Santa curls. Also, the Lone Ranger always wore white, and this tall stranger was dressed in light tan pants and a faded beige jacket, but I don’t think Clayton Moore ever had the kind with a rib-knit waist and cuffs. To anyone other than me, my lone ranger probably looked like a forty-odd-year-old off-duty photocopier repairman on his way to play candlepins at the local bowling alley. I wanted to kneel and kiss his feet.

“Jesus,” I repeated, without waiting for the guy to answer. “ ‘Thank you’ doesn’t even say it.”

“Forget it,” he said, stroking Kimi, then thumping her on the shoulder in the manner of someone who likes big dogs with deep, wide chests that resonate with comforting booms. “The traffic isn’t so bad on that side, and, hey, I’ve got dogs myself.”

“Oh,” I said brightly. “What kind?”

Suppose that instead of saving Kimi’s life, he’d just punched me in the stomach, converted me to Rosicrucianism, or failed to sell me tax-free municipal bonds. Anything. It’s a reflex. Tickle me, I giggle. Stick a finger down my throat, I gag. Tell me you have a dog, I ask what kind.

“Mutt, I guess you’d say.” He shrugged his shoulders. “Not like this.” He jerked a thumb toward Kimi.

“Oh, what kind?” I asked again.
Mutt
, by the way, is not what I’d usually say and not what I’d ever write. The word is banned from the pages of
Dog’s Life
, as is
mongrel
. A dog that’s half one breed and half another is a cross, like a Lab-golden cross. A something mix means that the dog’s part something, like a Dobie mix or a shepherd mix, unless his ancestry is anybody’s guess, in which case he’s simply a mix or, better yet, an all-American.

“Uh, kind of like a shepherd. I only got one now.” Despite the weird sixty-degree weather that had tricked lots of forsythia into mad bloom, the sun was setting promptly on its December schedule. By now, it was so dark out that I couldn’t see his face clearly, but he sounded so sad that I didn’t ask about the other dog or dogs. I wondered whether he’d had one killed by a car and whether that was why he’d taken the risk of saving Kimi. “Bear, his name is,” he
added, his voice suddenly unapologetic, his face breaking into a smile.

“I’d like to see him,” I said. True. Mention a dog, and I’d practically always like to see him. “Um, my name is Holly Winter. This is Kimi. The one in the car is Rowdy.”

Rowdy’s nose was plastered to the window, and his eyes were fixed on the dried liver and cheese I’d spilled on the asphalt several mental eons ago. If he’d watched it being deposited there during the early Pleistocene, his gaze wouldn’t have wandered since.

“John. John Buckley.” Our savior nodded and held out his hand. I shook it. For what it’s worth, his clasp was muscular.

“You live around here?” I asked.

“Just, uh, moved here,” he said, stepping away. “Hey, I gotta—”

“Well, if you need a good vet for Bear, this one’s terrific.” I gestured toward the clinic. “He’s a friend of mine, so I’m sort of biased, but he really is good. Hey, come in with me. Come and meet him.”

“Uh, thanks, but I gotta go.”

“And,” I added enthusiastically, “if you want to do any dog training, there’s a really good club here, Cambridge Dog Training. Every Thursday night, at the armory. On Concord Avenue, right near the Fresh Pond traffic circle. It’s not far from here. Beginners’ starts at seven.”

“Uh, thanks, but like I said, he’s—”

“That doesn’t matter,” I interrupted, eager to give him something. “There are lots of mixed breeds there, and you can show at fun matches. You can get all-American obedience titles, the whole thing.” Having already held him up when he wanted to leave, I pressed on. “Or you can just fool around and have
fun. And you’re new here. You can meet people. We’ll see you there, huh?”

He stopped inching away. “You can show a dog that’s not, uh, AKC? You sure about that?”

Need a translation? The AKC is the American Kennel Club, the largest dog registry in the United States.

“Yeah, positive,” I said. “I’ll tell you about it at dog training. I’ve got friends who do it. I’ll introduce you.”

As he moved away, I repeated the information about the Cambridge Dog Training Club, thanked him again, and impulsively reached for his hand. He extended it. I took it and squeezed hard, wanting somehow to maintain contact with him. I must have leaned toward him, too. His breath smelled faintly of whiskey. Well, if he drank in the afternoon, so what? Jesus turned water into wine. Rescue my dog, you resurrect me.

One of these days, Steve Delaney, D.V.M., is going to lift a dog that’s an ounce too heavy for him, wreck his back, and have to quit hefting dogs the size of mine onto the metal exam table. It hasn’t happened yet.

After he’d run his hands over Kimi’s haunches, then mine—
your
vet isn’t quite this thorough?—he hoisted her onto the table, where she crouched rather uneasily, but ran her wet red tongue over his smooth forehead and whiskery cheeks. Steve doesn’t intend to grow a beard, but he’s always getting up in the middle of the night for emergencies, then sleeping too late to have time to shave, or else plain forgetting, so his face usually looks as if it’s entering what I’m told is the itchy phase and is definitely the scratchy one.

“So it was my own damn fault,” I said, concluding my recitation of Kimi’s near miss.

He nodded absently, gently raising Kimi’s upper lip and peering at her molars. “You’ve been brushing?”

“Yes. You aren’t listening.”

“I’m examining your dog,” he said. I was examining him. Steve is tall and lean, with greenish-blue eyes and wavy brown hair, but what do details matter?
He has a rumpled look that makes you vow that he won’t get enough sleep tonight, either. “She wouldn’t have stood a chance, you know,” he said, without, I might add, putting all the blame on me. “And you didn’t get the guy’s address?”

“Yes, I did.”

“Cambridge?”

“Cambridge is a place. What was I supposed to do? Ask for complete ID? Maybe he’ll show up at dog training.”

“How drunk was he?”

“He wasn’t drunk; he’d been drinking. All I did was smell whiskey on his breath, and I didn’t even notice it until he was leaving. But I probably wasn’t paying a lot of attention. Here I am ready to throw myself under a car trying to get to her, and all of a sudden, out of nowhere, he jumps through the traffic and grabs her? If he’d been drunk, he’d be dead now. And he wasn’t staggering, and his speech wasn’t thick or anything. Anyhow, what do I care? If he wants to freebase cocaine and rescue my dog, I’ll hold the spoon.”

“I’m seeing some tartar,” Steve said.

“She eats the toothpaste, and then when I try to brush, she chomps on my hand,” I said. “And if I wrap my finger with gauze, it’s worse because her teeth go right through it. Maybe he just started drinking when his dog died. The dog got killed by a car,” I added, “and he took to the bottle and started rescuing other dogs from the same fate.”

Steve opened the demirefrigerator where he stores perishable medications, vaccines, and milk, which isn’t medicinal, but he hates those nondairy powders. The combination is perfectly safe. Steve is a really good veterinarian, and even an incompetent
one wouldn’t mistake a vial of rabies vaccine for a carton of milk and end up immunizing his coffee.

“Would you hold her?” he said.

I wrapped my arms around Kimi’s shoulders and hugged her hard against me, partly to comfort her in case the shots hurt, but mostly to prevent her from suddenly twisting, lunging, and sinking her lupine canines into Steve’s arm. Some vets routinely muzzle all big dogs—a few cowards muzzle all dogs—but Steve hardly ever uses a muzzle. Also, he knows how brave Kimi is. In fact, she hardly flinched.

Then I returned Kimi to the waiting room, handed her over to Rhonda, one of Steve’s technicians, and returned with Rowdy, who is, if anything, an even more cooperative patient than Kimi. He always yelps and howls when I inflict what he defines as real abuse, namely, a bath, but I’d held him dozens of times while Steve was giving him shots, sticking an otoscope in his ears, or squirting kennel cough vaccine up his nostrils, and I’d never felt him so much as momentarily tighten his muscles.

“So is Miner here yet?” I asked as Steve jabbed a hypodermic into Rowdy’s rear. Since Steve had taken over from old Dr. Draper a few years earlier, he’d been running what should have been a two-person practice all by himself. Lee Miner had been hired—on probation—as the second D.V.M. Steve needed.

“Yeah.” He parted the fur on Rowdy’s underbelly and checked for fleas.

“Don’t tell me,” I said. “Let me guess. You’re thrilled with him. I can hear it in your voice.”

“Holly, he’s been here all of one day, all right?”

“How bad is he?”

“Lee’s got good training, he worked with Patterson,
he comes highly recommended, and we’ve been over it all, okay?” The only veterinarian Steve entirely trusts is himself. I’d been pushing him to get help, but when Lee Miner had called to ask whether Steve was hiring, Lorraine, who really runs things for Steve, had said yes and had told Miner to send his resume. According to Steve, Lorraine was the one who’d hired Miner. “What he is,” Steve continued, “is meticulous.”

“Really? That’s good, isn’t it?”

“Yeah, and he’s real good with cats, real good. And Patterson said he has good hands.” Oscar Patterson, D.V.M., hadn’t meant what I mean if I tell you that Steve has good hands. Patterson probably hadn’t used the phrase at all. In fact, it seemed to me that in his letter of recommendation, Oscar Patterson had compared Miner to some obscure Greek god who was presumably the patron of fine motor skills. Patterson not only wrote poetry, but got it published. “And,” Steve added, “Jackie, Lee’s wife, is real, uh, lively.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Like I said, lively. Vivacious.”

“I know what
lively
means. Anyway, is it going to work out? They’re happy with the apartment? They’re getting settled in?”

According to Steve, Lorraine had evicted him when she’d hired Miner. The apartment came with the job. It’s spacious, light, airy, pet-welcoming, soundproof, and rent-free. The average affordable apartment in Cambridge is a basement room in a no-living-things slum. Furthermore, in a city in which every unoccupied parking space turns out to be located in a tow zone, it offers ample off-street parking. Oh, and it’s directly above Steve’s clinic. Any normal
Cambridge veterinarian would’ve rented the place to five or six desperately broke graduate students, but Steve had always liked it, and the Miners had evidently been glad to get it. They were young, and I assumed that Lee Miner was still paying off big loans from veterinary school. His wife was starting a master’s program at Lesley College in January. His loans and her tuition? Of course they liked the apartment.

“They haven’t complained yet,” Steve said as he rubbed the soft fur between Rowdy’s ears. At the risk of bragging about my own dog, let me mention that Rowdy has what’s considered the ideal malamute head, namely, broad and moderately rounded across the skull. His ears are medium-size triangular wedges set wide apart, and he has a good blocky muzzle, too. Gorgeous dog.