Ruffly Speaking (16 page)

“Like Professor Finley,” Leah said.

“What?” I asked.

“My father told me. It’s a sort of famous Harvard story. Professor Finley... He was a professor of classics, and one morning he was taking a walk by the river, and there were some men fishing there, and he greeted them in Latin:
'Salvete piscatores’
—Hail, fishermen—and then supposedly one of the guys yelled out, ‘Hey, piss on you,
^to
o, buddy!’ ” Leah had kept her voice low, and when she finished, she glanced around as if to assure herself that no Parental figure had overheard her uttering the word
piss
>n public.

Doug certainly wasn’t offended. He laughed and said something about town and gown that reminded me of Kevin Dennehy.

“Doug?” I began. “Uh, Morris may have thought Alice Savery was sort of the quintessential Cambridge eccentric, but, Doug, did you know that she’s actually gone to the police? About Ruffly? They don’t take her seriously or anything.”

“Oh, she hasn’t! The harridan! She never... She calls me incessantly!” He switched to a wickedly accurate mockery of Alice Savery’s Brattle Street pseudo-British. “ ‘Mr. Winer, that dog has been in my trash again,’ and then she goes into the most revolting details about saliva and the rabies virus, and I don’t have the patience with her that Morris did. The last time she called me, I said to her, ‘Miss Savery, what’s tearing up your trash bags are the raccoons living in
your
carriage house’—it’s a fright, and it’s positively infested with animals—‘and,’ I told her, ‘if you’d have it tom down or repaired, you’d have no more problems with your precious
refuse!’
”

“Raccoons are more likely to carry rabies than a dog is,” I said. “And rabies actually is spreading in Massachusetts. The biggest problem is that people are getting panicky.”

“Oh, Morris wanted to get the poor things all vaccinated,” Doug said. “He was reading about Alpine foxes. He had some grand plan about feeding the raccoons some kind of Swiss rabies vaccine....”

Silence fell at our table. Leah had the tact not to break it. Doug and I shared what seemed to me a moment of mourning. For all Morris’s frivolity, he cared about other living creatures, and he acted on his concern. It sounds corny to say that he’d risked his life to save a stranger, but the time he’d plunged into the Charles, that’s precisely what he’d done. Lots of animal lovers were worried that public panic about the spread of rabies would result in senseless efforts to eradicate raccoons, opossums, bats, and even properly vaccinated cats and dogs. Morris hadn’t merely felt sorry for the wild animals; he’d intended to protect the helpless raccoons in his own neighborhood.

Maybe the grief for Morris was more than Doug could tolerate. “My staff!” He shot to his feet. “I have to see what they’re up to. If I don’t keep an eye on them every second,” he confided to Leah, “they do the most unbelievable things. Last week I caught Fyodor exiting the kitchen with a tray, and something about it looked peculiar to me, and I reached out and flipped open one of the sandwiches, and you’ll never believe what was in it! I almost passed out. Garbage! Some stupid boy in the kitchen had mixed it up with the
crab salad!
And Fyodor has been told a hundred thousand times to check every order just as if he were going to consume it himself, but with Fyodor, everything goes in one ear and out the other without tarrying in between. A garbage sandwich!”

“The customer might not even have noticed,” Leah pointed out. Entirely ignorant of the circumstances and stories surrounding Morris Lamb’s death, she added innocently, “Some people don’t even notice. They’ll eat absolutely anything.”

17

 Playing the dog show game without bragging is like passing Go without bothering to collect your two hundred dollars; if you give it a miss, you aren’t really playing at all. Everyone passes Go, of course, but not everyone has the good fortune to be the first to land on Boardwalk, and if you happen to be the lucky one, you’re not merely expected to snap it up, but considered a hopeless fool unless you promptly invest your all to up the rent from that token fifty dollars. If you’ve got a shot at Park Place? Buy! Add houses! Buy a hotel! Buy two! Monopoly is not some New Age game.

Neither are dog shows. When American and Canadian Champion Malopoly’s Boardwalk Beauty, C.D-. T.T., W.P.D., goes Best of Breed at the Atlantic City Area Specialty, at a minimum you’re expected to send in the win to your area editor so it can appear in the “Something to Howl About” column of the
Alaskan Malamute Club of America Newsletter.
And when she’s linebred to

Ch. Monolith’s Park Place? Or when you’re just so proud of her that a mere gratis newsletter howl won’t do? Well, what you do then is to take out a full-page ad in
The Malamute Quarterly,
which, like every other self-respecting breed-specific publication, provides its subscribers with an unparalleled opportunity to brag, brag, brag about their dogs in unbridled and endlessly satisfactory detail, an opportunity, I might add, completely denied to human parents.

Really. Flip open an issue of
The Malamute Quarterly,
and what do you find? Right at the top of the page: Am/Can Ch. Malalong Cassidy, C.D.X., R.O.M., then a gorgeous show photo, and, underneath it, the dog’s OFA number and rating (excellent), CHD probability (almost zero), and the information that he’s CERF clear, then a four-generation pedigree, and maybe a list of his own impressive wins and achievements and those of his get, and then something like, “The foundation sire of Malalong Kennels, Cass is so ideal that he makes the standard look untypey. This dog has everything—beauty, brains, movement....” Brag, brag, brag! Check out
The Borzoi Quarterly, The Irish Wolfhound Quarterly, Doberman World, The Corgi Cryer,
any breed publication you like.

With one exception. Which one? The one that doesn’t exist. Where, O where is
The Human Being Quarterly
?
Baby World
? Where is
The Infant Cryer
? Where are the wonderful advertisements, the gorgeous photos, and the strings of letters and numbers attesting to health, intelligence, and temperament? Where, where, where are the
brags?
Nowhere. Why? The answer, sad and obvious: The game of human children is Monopoly with no Go and no two hundred dollars, nothing to brag of at all.

Or so I assumed until I met Ivan, whose last name was not, in fact, The Terrible, but Flynn-Isaacson. This boy seemed to me definitely to merit a costly spread in
Kiddy Kennel Review.
I’d observed Ivan’s foray into Alice Savery’s territory, but the date of our first real encounter was Wednesday, July 1. The place was the Avon Hill Summer Program. The occasion was a hands-on grooming workshop. The
hands
were those of Leah’s eight students. The on was Rowdy, who’d been drafted into service because he was both big enough to go around and sucker enough to tolerate what I imagined would be the inept swipes and yanks of sixteen brush-and-comb-wielding juvenile fists.

Perhaps I should say outright that especially since I got involved with Malamute Rescue, I have come to resent young children. I don’t have anything against them
per se
or
in vacuo,
as one not only says in Cambridge, but says aloud, preferably in the hearing of other people. No, what I increasingly have against little children is the same thing I have against cats, a species I unequivocally like,
per se
and
in vacuo.
I keep getting all these phone calls from people who would make great adoptive owners of rescued Malamutes if only, only, only they didn’t have those damned babies. Or toddlers. The policy laid down by Betty Burley, the coordinator of our local rescue effort, is that we don’t place rescue dogs in families with young children. Period. If you ask Betty why, she’ll explain that we don’t know the entire life histories of the dogs. The truth is that Betty doesn’t trust parents. Neither do I, and with good reason: How far can you trust people ashamed to brag and too cheap to advertise?

Back to Ivan. By ten-thirty on Wednesday morning, my portable grooming table was set up on the grass adjacent to Leah’s classroom at AHSP, and all eight of Leah’s little beasts, five girls and three boys, were simultaneously practicing their rudimentary grooming skills on what was undoubtedly the happiest Alaskan malamute ever to grace a Goodrich nonskid easy-clean vinyl surface, and that’s saying something. Rowdy is crazy about children, and if you avoid water to the extent of not even whisper-

ing the word, he loves to be groomed. Once Leah’s campers, if you’ll pardon the gross expression, started carefully parting and brushing out their assigned sections of Rowdy’s coat, he would’ve been content to stand patiently, his feet firmly planted, for as long as they’d continue to stroke him.

Leah had wisely assigned Rowdy’s head to the tallest child, a round-faced Asian girl named Mee Lee, who had a trace of an accent and the deft and gentle touch you’d expect in a professional groomer with ten years’ experience. Mee Lee was dressed in brand-new pink Oshkosh overalls and a matching flowered jersey; and the tiny red-haired girl dutifully working on Rowdy’s left foreleg foot wore a lavender shorts-and-top outfit with appliquéd butterflies that might as well have been arranged to spell out “I’m from the suburbs.” The remaining six were scruffy Cambridge whiz kids with rumpled unisex clothes and uncombed hair. A golden-eyed boy with coffee-colored skin and a plump, yellow-haired girl discovered that each had accompanied a parent to Cuba the previous winter. He went with his mother, she with her father. Neither child seemed even slightly surprised to learn that the other, too, had met Castro. Was I impressed? Not at all. Whenever I find myself in Havana, I always pop in for a nice gossip, of course, but I’d always supposed that adulthood had its privileges.

Ivan, who’d been handed the vital but ignominious assignment of brushing Rowdy’s tail and anal area, didn’t mention any recent hobnobbing with Fidel. He made quite a powerful impression on me nonetheless. Except for those big, round violet-blue eyes, he wasn’t much to look at, a scrawny, wiry kid whose brown hair still stuck up in the clumps and tufts I’d noticed the first time I’d seen him and evidently hadn’t been shampooed since. But as soon as I began to talk with him, I finally understood how he’d quickly become the focus of Leah and

Matthew’s attention. Planted at Rowdy’s heavily furred rear end, Ivan carefully grasped the dog’s tail in his left hand, raised it, pointed an undercoat rake straight ahead, caught my eye, and demanded to know, first, whether the anal sacs were vestigial organs and, second, whether Rowdy would mind having them emptied.

I shot a protective hand toward Rowdy. “Yes! He certainly would mind. And they don’t need emptying. They’re not full.”

“Do they ever explode?” Ivan asked eagerly.

“Not that I’ve noticed.” I sounded casual, as if such an event might entirely fail to blow my superb sangfroid.

“I read that in a book,” Ivan explained. “It said that sometimes if dogs are, like, in stressful situations, they’ll explode. All of a sudden, they’ll just empty their anal sacs.”

“I guess that sounded pretty interesting,” I murmured.

“It did.” His reedy little-boy voice was serious, but those eyes gave him away. “I wondered if it made a noise.”

“What it makes is a mess,” I said firmly. “And it doesn’t smell very good, either. But if you’re worried about having it happen while you’re working on his tail, don’t, because it isn’t going to. His anal sacs aren’t full, and that’s not how he reacts to stress. Besides, he likes being groomed, and he likes being the center of attention. He’s having a good time.” Then, either because I’m slow to catch on or because Ivan looked like a little kid and, damn it, was one, I put on a high-pitched talking-to-dopes voice and inquired, “Do you know what kind of a dog Rowdy is?”

“Kotzebue,” Ivan said, “but not pure Kotzebue. Is that how you pronounce it?”

Kotzebue?
About one adult in five hundred thousand can recognize an Alaskan malamute, never mind tell a Kotzebue from a M’Loot. To malamute fanciers, the distinction between the two principal lines is sharp and clear, but practically no one else even knows that it exists.