Gone to the Dogs (5 page)

Rowdy and I did some brisk heeling. He retrieved his dumbbell a couple of times, and then I got out three plain white cotton work gloves to give him a few minutes of practice on the directed retrieve. It’s a Utility exercise, of course, and we were working in Open, but he enjoyed it, and the practice helped to build my confidence that we’d eventually make it to Utility. Besides, even if you never leave home, it’s handy to have a dog who’ll sight along your arm and retrieve whatever you’re pointing toward—your keys, your scarf, the book you’re too lazy to retrieve yourself. If you fall, break your leg, and can’t get to the phone, you can send the dog for it—assuming it’s cordless—and don’t laugh. That’s really happened. In the sacred words of the Good Booklet, the American Kennel Club Obedience Regulations: “The purpose of Obedience Trials is to demonstrate the usefulness
of the pure-bred dog as a companion to man.” Or any dog as a companion to anyone, including woman, too, of course. Oh, yes, if you don’t show, maybe you wonder why Obedience Trials is capitalized. The explanation is the American Kennel Club capitalizes almost all words that have anything to do with Itself or Its Sacred Animal: Obedience Trial, Dog Show, Long Down, Directed Retrieve, Tracking Test, Golden Retriever, Malamute, and thousands of others. My father carries this loyal stylistic practice to an extreme. He always capitalizes the
d
in Dog, of course, and when he’s feeling really enthusiastic, he writes the whole word in uppercase letters, usually followed by an exclamation point: DOG! But, then, he’s a religious fanatic.

“Hope thinks Patterson was murdered by one of his clients,” I told Steve. “She says all that talk about how he was lured away by a woman is just gossip. She doesn’t know about Geri being pregnant, and, naturally, I didn’t tell her. So what about the rest of it? Is it really just gossip?”

We were in the house he was renting, seated at the scarred butcher block table by the big kitchen window that overlooks the pond. In front of me were arrayed a fish sandwich, a large chocolate shake, a large order of french fries, and a garden salad with ranch, all picked up at McDonald’s after I’d left the armory and dropped Rowdy at home. Steve doesn’t exactly cook, either, but the kitchen of the house he was renting had a microwave, and he’d discovered an Indian food shop that sold things like frozen beef
vindaloo
, TV dinner curried prawns, fresh coriander chutney, and bottled lemon pickle.

When I’d arrived at his house, he’d just irradiated four trays. One contained minuscule squares of an okay chick-pea concoction you could substitute for corn bread in the event of rationing. I also recognized one that’s like creamed spinach with some nonfood ingredient stirred in, say, sandalwood incense. The
other two trays had lumps of meat in reddish brown sauces that didn’t smell like any of the choices to get with Chicken McNuggets. After offering to share, he’d upended all four trays on a plate and spooned on four or five kinds of chutney and pickles, not dill, either.

“Gossip,” he said, forking a lump of meat that would have dermabraded a normal American mouth back to the womb. “You ever met Geri?”

“No,” I said. “Have you?”

“Yeah, at a conference. Geraldine, I guess her real name is. She and Patterson have been together for years. They seemed real tight to me, and I didn’t notice him looking around. Don’t you want some of this? The top of my head’s sweating already.”

“I eat American. It’s patriotic, like cars, okay?” I ripped open the plastic packet of good, wholesome ranch dressing and dribbled it evenly over my salad. “Maybe I’d like a Nissan Pathfinder, but I drive a Ford Bronco.”

“All this stuff comes from New Jersey,” he said, “at least the frozen stuff.”

“So he wasn’t looking around? Was there anyone to look at?”

“Oh, yeah, a whole bunch of veterinary students, some other women, but Patterson didn’t act that interested. It was more like Geri was running interference for him, that kind of thing. If anyone was looking around, it was her, not him.”

“Were the Miners there?”

“No. That’s part of the idea of not doing a one-man practice. Ask Lorraine. You’ve got somebody to cover for you, so you can get away without having to scout around for someone to fill in.”

“You want some? I got a large fries,” I said.
“There are plenty left. So, anyway, is that story true, about the client and the dog that died?”

“Yeah, it seems to be. I get the feeling that Lee doesn’t want to talk about it. But Jackie’ll tell you all about it.” He pointed to my milk shake. “Can I have some of that?”

“Of course,” I said. Dog ownership renders you nearly incapable of disgust: You’ve not only seen it all, but wiped it off the floor afterward. Steve used that chocolate milk shake to wash down lemon pickle piled on sandalwood spinach, then downed a half-bottle of Japanese beer as a chaser. My stomach didn’t even lurch. “So what’d Jackie say?”

“This was a week ago Sunday,” Steve said. “Lee got a call about a dog that was in bad shape. At night. Late. And so he told the guy to bring the dog to the hospital, and he’d meet him there. This was a regular client, not somebody new. So as soon as Lee got there, the owner left. Then Patterson showed up.”

“What?”

“His house is right nearby. It’s like a farm, I guess. Maybe it was a farm originally. Whatever, he and Geri live right there. So Patterson must have heard the car or seen lights or something. So the dog’s there, and he’s real sick, should’ve been brought in sooner.”

“What was wrong with him?”

“Jackie didn’t say. Anyway, Patterson showed up and took over. Sounds like him.” Steve got up, returned with the lemon pickle, and started eating it right out of the jar. “He’s, uh, kind of a dominant individual,” he said. That’s his phrase for Rowdy and Kimi, too. I like dominant individuals. “He’s just that kind of guy. So he told Lee to go home.”

“And did he?”

“Yeah, except that when Lee was leaving, the owner showed up again and started yelling. Lee knew the guy, and so I guess Lee thought things might get rough, and he didn’t feel like sticking around. Jackie didn’t say it that way, but that’s what it sounded like to me. You can’t take her too seriously. The dog died, and if you listen to her, he’d’ve lived if Lee’d taken care of him, that kind of thing.”

“Is that possible?”

He shrugged his shoulders. “What she says is that the owner showed up and started hollering like a madman, and Patterson was yelling back at him about how he should’ve brought the dog in sooner.”

“Maybe he should have,” I said. “So Lee just ran away?”

Steve shrugged again. Then he leaned back, tilted his chair, and kept it balanced on two legs. “Jackie says Patterson told Lee to leave, and when Patterson was in that kind of mood, Lee didn’t like to stick around.”

“And?”

“And nothing. End of story. It took them a while to work out that Patterson was gone. Next morning, Geri thought he’d got up early and gone to work. And at the hospital, they thought he was home.”

“What about the owner?”

“Yeah. After a while, sometime the next day, when Oscar still hadn’t shown up, Lee or somebody called the police. Geri didn’t want to do it, at least according to Jackie. Jackie says that when Geri really got it that Patterson was gone, she was afraid people’d think he ran out on her.”

“So what
did
Geri think?”

“That Patterson was playing some kind of a game. Geri thought it was some kind of bad joke or
that he’d taken off and he’d turn up after a while. But everyone at the clinic took it real seriously, and after forty-eight hours or whatever someone called the police. And when the police heard about the circumstances, they started asking the dog’s owner some questions. And after that, the owner took off.”

“So they’re still looking for him?”

“I don’t know. It’s been over a week. Maybe he’s shown up by now.”

“Have you ever heard of that?” I asked. “An owner getting that mad?”

“They get mad,” Steve said. “But it’s more likely to be because, once the animal’s dead, they don’t want to pay. Or when they thought he was dying, they’d pay anything for you to save him. Then once you do, they decide you’re overcharging, or the animal would’ve been fine if they’d just kept it home.”

“But malpractice does happen,” I said. “Like when Ron had Vixen spayed? Before he started taking her to Dr. Draper? And some owners must end up suing. I mean, this
is
Massachusetts.” If you live somewhere else, you may not realize that this is the personal injury capital of the United States. “They don’t usually murder their veterinarians or even get violent, but they do get mad enough to sue, I’ll bet.”

“This was New Hampshire,” Steve said. “Just over the line. I don’t know what the law is there, but in most states, you know, it’s different from M.D.’s. Most states, the burden is on the veterinarian to prove that the animal didn’t die because of malpractice. Or negligence. Guilty until proven innocent.”

“I know,” I said. “Do you ever worry about that? About getting sued?”

“Not really. That part’s like M.D.’s. If you know
the people, you’re working together, you keep them informed, most people aren’t going to sue you.”

“And I suppose if they aren’t going to sue you, they aren’t going to murder you, either. You know, Steve, I didn’t exactly know Patterson, but it’s sort of hard to believe, uh, not just that he’d leave his practice like that, but that he’d run out on Geri. I mean, they weren’t high school kids.” Then I told Steve about what I’d read on the flyleaf of Patterson’s book. I half expected Steve to say that I was being corny, but he didn’t.

In fact, his face broke into a big open smile. “Yeah, it’s real special. There’s nothing like it. They come to life in your hands.”

“And Patterson was just a little boy,” I said. “Maybe I’m … I don’t know. It doesn’t jibe. A guy who’s had that experience? And it was important to him. It’s why he became a veterinarian in the first place. That’s what the flyleaf said. I keep thinking that the last thing a guy like that would do is run away. Anyway, the sad thing is that if Lee Miner hadn’t got scared that night, maybe nothing would’ve happened. No wonder Miner doesn’t want to talk about it. I’m surprised Jackie does.”

“She’ll talk your ear off about anything. I was thinking, if she’d been there instead of Lee—” Steve laughed and made a low Scottie growl. “Not much would scare her off.”

“Yeah,” I agreed. “She’d probably have dug her teeth into somebody’s ankle. That must be hard for Lee to take.”

“Christ, Holly.” Steve looked directly at me.

“Lee’s only on probation,” I said. “It doesn’t have to be permanent. And the idea of hiring somebody isn’t a mistake at all. You’re exhausted all the
time. Maybe this particular person won’t work out, but somebody will.”

Steve looked out the window toward the darkness of the pond as if he hoped to see something rise from it, preferably an unemployed veterinarian.

The prospect of a limited-enrollment intensive seminar on frozen semen might not persuade you (or even me) to abandon your lover and your dogs for a conference in Minneapolis, but, according to Steve, artificial insemination was more complex than I supposed. In ridiculing the conference and in refusing to go with him—he was staying with his mother—I was displaying my ignorance. If I thought that either he or I already knew everything there was to know about thawing methods, for instance, I was only kidding myself. I apologized and swore that I took reproductive management very seriously. I practiced it, didn’t I? In fact, I assured him, I hated to miss the whole conference, especially the keynote address, titled—and I’m not making this up—“Why Spoil the Fun?”

After I’d dropped Steve at Logan on Friday morning, I returned home. If you know Cambridge, you’ve probably noticed my house because of its proximity to a local landmark: Mine is the red three-decker right next to the little, narrow spite building on the corner of Appleton and Concord. And don’t ask me why it’s called a “spite” building. It was presumably erected during a property dispute involving a
former owner of my house. Anyway, one long brick wall of the spite building runs along half of my side yard, the rest of which is securely fenced to enclose what will become a charming city garden if I ever cure Kimi of digging.

Rowdy was a ferocious digger until the memorable day when I dragged him out of an especially deep hole, wrapped one hand around his muzzle, pointed the other toward the depths of his pit, and loudly informed him that if he succeeded in tunnelling straight through to the Orient, he’d emerge in the homeland of a breed known as the Chinese edible dog. If he didn’t want to end his days bathed in soy sauce, I yelled, he’d better reform pronto. And he did. Soon afterward, though, I adopted Kimi, who rapidly proved herself a fearless canine backhoe, strong, tireless, and impervious to warnings and threats about cultural differences in attitudes toward her species. If the route of the Iditarod Sled Dog Race led straight down from Anchorage into the bowels of the earth instead of to Nome? Well, with Kimi as my lead dog, I’d be Susan Butcher.

So that’s where I live, in the red house beyond the spite building and the earthworks, and when I returned there from Logan, I forced myself to resume work on an article about the Chinese crested, which was about to be promoted from the AKC’s Miscellaneous class to full recognition. The Chinese crested is a very small dog, under ten pounds, and I believe that it’s either inedible or never eaten. There are two varieties of Chinese crested: the powderpuff and the hairless. The latter has hair on its feet and on the tip of its tail, and a longish tuft on the top of its head, hence the name. The first Chinese crested I ever saw had black and white spotted skin, and—
Jesus, never say I said this, because it could cost me my job—I thought that it looked like the shrunken and shaven result of crossing a Dalmatian and a cockatiel. If you own one, well, I’m sorry, but, honestly, the first time you saw one, didn’t you think …? Oh, you didn’t? Well, now that Chinese crested fanciers have started to put obedience titles on their dogs, the breed doesn’t look funny to me, either.