Gone to the Dogs (7 page)

As I was saying, even if Rita had been in town, Kevin had been free, and both had accepted my invitation, they’d have had a rotten time. Besides, it was the annual holiday get-together of the Cambridge Dog Training Club, and neither of them is a member. In fact, the party wasn’t really mine. All I did was volunteer my place. It isn’t very big, but it’s so sparsely furnished that it will accommodate quite a few people, at least if they’re willing to stand or to sit on the floor. My Christmas tree was already up and decorated. All I had to do was clear the kitchen table for the potluck dishes everyone was bringing, set up a little bar on the counter, and pile a lot of birch logs in the fireplace. Then I carried a big box up from the basement, and unpacked, cleaned, and stuck red candles in all of the glass, silver, and pewter candle holders and ornate, multitiered candelabra won by my mother’s dogs and mine.

About ten minutes before people were due to arrive—no dogs invited—I put Rowdy and Kimi in
my bedroom, distributed the candles here and there, lit them, got the fire going, and started to worry. Rita once pointed out to me that my two worst preparty fears, that no one will come and that there won’t be enough to eat, are mutually exclusive, but before this party, I also worried about whether the three non-club-member guests I’d invited would fit in all right. I’d promised Steve, who was still away at the conference, to do what I could to welcome the Miners, but a veterinarian and his wife aren’t necessarily dog people. And John, Kimi’s savior? I hardly knew him.

As it turned out, so many people showed up that my apartment was crammed full: Roz and Vince, our instructors, and Diane D’Amato, Ron Coughlin, Arlene, Liz, the Metcalfs, Hope, and all the other present and lots of the past board members, and thirty or forty other people. Everyone who’d promised food brought it. Maybe I should have tried to coordinate the menu beforehand. Real dog people have a lot of things in common, of course, but ethnic background isn’t one of them. The spread on the table included a baked ham, a deep-dish casserole version of potato latkes, a bowl of hummus, a platter of tomato and goat cheese salad, a pan of lasagna, a molded cranberry and Jell-O salad, and a big mound of Chinese-style chicken wings.

And I needn’t have worried about John and the Miners. John never turned up at the party, and Jackie and Lee fit in fine. Not ten minutes after the Miners arrived, Jackie was popping hors d’oeuvres into her mouth and chatting with Diane D’Amato about stool samples, whipworm, and hot spots; and Lee was happily trading anecdotes with the Metcalfs about bitches in season and testicles that failed to drop. In other words, the party was a success right from the
beginning, and once the other guests found out that Lee had worked for Oscar Patterson, I modestly scored it in the mid-190’s on a scale that runs from 0 to 200. Mystified by the numbers? You don’t show dogs in obedience, do you?

Actually, the party was more like the breed ring than like obedience. Breed is conformation, right? How well each dog conforms to the standard? But there’s more than that to winning in breed. In addition to structural soundness, a good gait, and all the rest, a first-rate show dog has a big, attention-grabbing personality that tells the judge, “Hey! Look at me! Me! Me! Me! Hey, I’m the best! Put me up! Me! Me!” Rowdy, right? So I’m not insulting Jackie Miner, who occupied the center of the couch in the packed living room.

Jackie had on red high heels and a silky red dress trimmed with a myriad of tiny red-ribbon bows. Her eyes were keen, her expression was alert, and her black curls glistened so brightly that I assumed that she’d just left the groomer’s. “Oscar was a very, very dramatic person, self-dramatizing, if you want to know the truth,” she told Arlene, who was curled up on the hearth directly in front of the fire, where she blocked everyone’s view of the flaming birch logs and hogged all the warmth. Sometimes I worry about Arlene. Heat-seeking can be a sign of a thyroid problem, especially in an individual who’s overweight and has a dull, patchy coat or, in her case, lank, thin hair.

“Well, he
was
a poet,” Arlene said.

“Yes, but that’s certainly not how he earned his living,” said Jackie. “He certainly didn’t support himself and Geri by writing poetry. Did he, Lee? Lee! I’m saying that Oscar’s poetry was really a hobby. He
didn’t actually make his living from it. Isn’t that right?”

Lee Miner and Ray Metcalf were by the Christmas tree, admiring some of the ornaments, I imagine. Tinsel can foul up a dog’s digestive tract—it’s as dangerous as panty hose—and glass balls look too much like toys to be safe on low branches. Candy canes and popcorn get eaten, and electric cords are hazardous if you have a chewer like Kimi. Of course, I never pile presents under the tree unless I’m pretty sure that I know what’s in them and that it isn’t chocolate, which is toxic to dogs, or homemade jelly in breakable jars, or anything else edible, either. The dogs may survive, but it’s hard to write a sincere-sounding thank-you note when the present you actually received was a tatter of damp wrapping paper and some drool-sodden crumbs. But, I should add, my tree was far from barren, displaying as it did a rather large collection of small gold- and silver-plated retrievers engraved with the words “Puppy’s First Christmas” and eight or ten mock-crystal sled dogs, as well as some ordinary Santas, angels, ribbons, and doves, all of which Lee Miner was fingering.

As I was saying, Lee had good reason to admire the tree, and when Jackie interrupted him to ask whether Oscar Patterson’s poetry was a hobby, he looked toward her and said blandly, “Well, yes, I suppose so.”

“You see?” she said. “It was really part of Oscar’s
persona!”
She studied our faces to see whether we understood the word. “His image,” she added unnecessarily. “Like being in the country. Oscar loved to go on about smelling the country and tasting it and feeling it. He could get sort of disgusting about it, if
you ask me. He was always talking about smelling and tasting everything.”

“California,” someone said.

“As a matter of fact, he came from the Bronx.” Jackie’s tone suggested that she’d just explained everything about Oscar Patterson. For all I knew, she had. Is the Bronx a sensuous borough? I don’t know New York well at all. “And,” Jackie went on, rubbing one of the little bows on her dress, “he grew up in dire poverty. His father deserted the family, and his mother ran around with
men!”
Jackie paused, then continued. “And she drank, too. Oscar was obviously starved for affection, if you ask me.” Her voice dropped. “You could tell because he was always hugging and kissing everyone and putting his hands on people.” She crossed her left knee over the right, flexed the arch of the extended foot, and examined either her ankle or her red high-heeled pump.

Arlene looked disappointed. “Was he really from the Bronx? That doesn’t … I mean, you don’t expect …”

“Yes, he was definitely from the Bronx,” Jackie told her. “He’d lost his New York accent.” She added, as if the new information would contradict the old, “But he was very attractive to women, in a kind of Errol Flynn, Lord Byron way, lots of curly dark hair? Except a lot shorter. But when you got to know him, he was very, very bossy. Just ask Lee. Lee, I’ve been saying how bossy Oscar could be, and I want you to back me up on that. Is that true? Now when you got to know Oscar, was that one bossy, bossy man?”

Lee, who’d been edging toward the kitchen, stopped, turned, and raised his narrow chin about one inch.

“You see?” Jackie said. “Lee says the same thing. But the owners liked it. They like a firm statement. It builds confidence. I always tell Lee: Owners aren’t paying to hear what all the possibilities are. Lecture them all about what it could be, and they decide you’re guessing, and they aren’t one bit happy to pay today’s fees for some shot in the dark. That’s one reason Oscar was so popular.”

“From what I hear,” said Ron Coughlin, who was sitting next to me on the floor, “there was one guy he wasn’t all that popular with.”

“Or one woman he really was,” said Barbara Doyle. I remembered that she was a Patterson fan. The one time I’d seen Oscar Patterson, at the poetry reading, he hadn’t looked like Lord Byron to me, except that his hair was dark and that he’d forgotten to do up the top buttons on his shirt. But Barbara does look romantic. She has fluffy curls and wears lacy, velvety clothes that are totally impractical for someone with German shepherds.

“No, no,” Jackie said. “I don’t know why people are saying that, because it was definitely, definitely Cliff Bourque, and if Oscar had minded his own business and let Lee take care of that dog, it never would’ve happened.”

“What kind of dog was it?” I asked. If fate assigns you a role, why recast yourself? Besides, maybe because the story about the young Patterson cradling the newborn puppies had touched me, I felt protective toward him and even toward Geri, whom I didn’t know at all. At any rate, I was glad that Jackie hadn’t told everyone that Geri was pregnant and that Patterson might have run out on her. I wanted Jackie to talk about anything else, preferably dogs rather than people.

Jackie answered my question about Cliff Bourque’s dog. “Some kind of sled dog,” she said. “Lee will know.”

“A malamute?” I asked. The Alaskan malamute isn’t a rare breed, of course. Even so, the number of people active in the breed, people who show or belong to the clubs, is small enough so that I know, or at least know of, a lot of them. I’d never heard of any Cliff Bourque.

“Uh-uh. Something weird. They had a few of them, him and his wife. She was my hairdresser, which is how I know, and she’s a very, very nice woman. I feel sorry for her. He must be a very disturbed man. A vet.”

I was stunned. Why would a vet have …?

“Vietnam,” Jackie said. “For all we know, and I for one think it’s very likely, Cliff had some kind of flashback, and when Oscar broke the news that the dog was dead, it took him back to the jungle, and he went completely out of control. And what he did then was take to the woods, if you ask me.” She swept a hand wildly toward some imaginary forest.

“That’s awful,” Arlene said.

“His poor wife,” said someone else.

“Could be worse,” Ron murmured to me. “If she’s a hairdresser, probably she at least knows how to groom—”

But Jackie overheard. “You know, it’s no joking matter,” she said severely.

I felt chastised. It seemed to me that off and on over the past few days, I’d been guilty of treating Oscar Patterson’s unsolved disappearance as something of a joking matter. In spite of her irksome dramatics, Jackie Miner, though, clearly took it very seriously indeed.

Ron apologized. Everyone fell silent. Mostly to smooth over the awkwardness, Ray Metcalf changed the subject. “Well, there’s one thing I’ve heard about Oscar Patterson that I can’t help admiring, and that’s that he taught Dickie Brenner a good lesson.”

“Brenner!” Jackie said. “Well, I can tell you positively everything about him, and none of it’s good! Before I knew better, I took Willie to him, and let me tell you …”

Both Ron and I had had about enough of Jackie, and as he followed me into the kitchen, he asked, “Who’s this Brenner?”

I refilled the ice bucket and tidied up around the sink. “Some kind of dog behavior expert. A consultant.”

In Cambridge at least,
consultant
means anything or nothing, or maybe I’m still too much an outsider to understand what it does mean except that consultants tell other people what to do. Can that be right? Why should people pay all these consultants to give them a lot of advice they probably don’t want and won’t take? Anyway, Vince, our head trainer, and Roz, who does our advanced classes, evidently understood the word or shared my take on it, because they both stepped in to gripe about Brenner.

“Those people make me so
mad!”
said Roz, who seldom looks or acts more than quietly annoyed. In dog training, anger is useful only as a warning that it’s time to stop, and Roz is too busy to waste time on anything useless. She keeps her gray hair short and straight, wears indestructible, indistinguishable wash-and-wear clothes, and seldom seems to feel any strong emotion except love for dogs and pride in their achievements. But she can seethe if she thinks
they’re being mistreated. “Do you know what he does?” She looked slowly around at us.

“What do people expect?” Vince said. “They’re too lazy to train their own dogs, and they turn them over to someone else.”

“Fine for them,” Roz said, “But what about the dogs? They don’t deserve it, do they? And Brenner’s not the only one, either.”

“Would someone tell me who Brenner is?” Ron asked.

“You see?” Roz said. “You people haven’t even heard of Brenner, and the reason why is that you won’t catch him in an obedience ring, not on your life. You know what he tells people? ‘Oh, those AKC types. They don’t know anything.’ And what he does, Ron, is to get people to leave their dogs there, with him, supposedly to be trained, or else he charges them a fortune for private lessons with the dog, where he does all the training, if you want to call it that. What I call it is abuse, plain and simple.” Roz clenched her jaw and pinched her lips together. Her eyes flashed.

“Rubber hoses,” Vince said.

“Is that what it is?” I said. “Jesus. Mostly all I know about Brenner is that I’ve seen the ads. Off-leash training, right?”

“But doesn’t the guy have to have some kind of credentials?” Ron asked. “He must’ve done something.”

“Yeah,” Vince said. “Brenner’s credentials are that he put up a sign and took out some ads, and then he was an instant expert. And then after a while, the ads said he’d been in business a long time, and after a while, it was true enough. He had been.”

“So how did Oscar Patterson …?” I started to ask.

“Brenner’s up in that area somewhere,” Vince said. “I heard about it from Ray, because the dog that Brenner and Patterson had the fight about a couple of months back was a Clumber spaniel.”

Ray and Lynne Metcalf raise Clumber spaniels. In case you haven’t seen one—they’re fairly rare—I should mention that they have long bodies like basset hounds, massive heads, and soft, light-colored coats. A Clumber is about as tall as an English springer spaniel, but much, much heftier.