Gone to the Dogs Read online

  “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.

  2

  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.

  “And,” Steve continued, “the house is okay.” He’d rented a little white cape on Little Spy Pond in Belmont, just over the line from Cambridge, about ten minutes from my place, where I reserve my first floor exclusively for myself and my dogs, and rent the other two apartments. I like it that way.

  “So did you ask him about Patterson?”

  “Jesus, Holly. He’s probably sick of it.”

  “Well, Bonnie isn’t sick of it,” I said. Bonnie’s my editor at Dog’s Life. Oscar Patterson, D.V.M., had vanished from his New Hampshire clinic about ten days ago. The news had taken three days to reach Bonnie, and, since then, she’d been pestering me to do a story about Oscar Patterson and his disappearance, but what can you write about a total mystery? The lack of facts had ignited a firestorm of speculation in both the dog and literary worlds. “She wants anything,” I said. “He breeds foxhounds. He believes in pyramids.”

  “Does he?”

  “How would I know? I only saw him once. I got dragged to a reading he did, maybe four years ago. It was incredibly boring.” Ever been to a poetry reading? In Cambridge, they’re hard to avoid. If you’re lucky, they’re held at cafés, where you can order coffee. Then you can drink it and fiddle with the silverware instead of having to sit still with nothing to do. “He did have a sort of dramatic manner,” I said. “His voice went up and down. Maybe he was too abstract for me.”

  I didn’t say it to Steve, but the idea of a veterinarian-poet or vice versa had originally hit me as ludicrous. Ascariasis? Sarcoptic mange? Is this the stuff of sonnets? But romance isn’t fashionable now, anyway. Even so, Oscar Patterson’s poems weren’t about pets and diseases, and probably I set myself up for disappointment by looking forward to something like a free-verse update of the epitaph Lord Byron wrote for the monument to Boatswain, his Newfoundland, but with a medical explanation of why the dog died, of course. Everything Patterson read when I heard him was pastoral: How I moved to the country and found depth in a shallow pond.… Look, I grew up in Owls Head, Maine. Show me a shallow pond, and I see a few bony pickerel, a lot of weeds, and a muddy bottom.

  But could I tell you something about Oscar Patterson? His poetry didn’t move me, and neither did his dramatic style of reading it, but one detail about Patterson’s life really got to me and left me with the sense that I knew the child he’d been. I didn’t learn this crucial fact from Oscar Patterson himself but from a thumbnail sketch of his life that appeared on the flyleaf of one his books. The guy who took me to Patterson’s reading—this was before Steve—had brought the book along for Patterson to sign. I remember feeling embarrassed about that. To ask Patterson for his autograph hit me as gauche, very un-Cambridge. As I understood it, in Cambridge the point wasn’t to fawn over celebrities but to become one yourself or, failing that, to act as if you could be instantly famous if you so desired. In the paraphrased words of a great American poet—not Oscar Patterson—I was a veteran sophisticate in those days; I’m a no-finesse novice now.

  Anyway, as I’d sat drinking bitter espresso in the café while waiting for Patterson to appear, I’d glanced at the flyleaf and read about Patterson’s life. What got to me was this: Patterson grew up in the Bronx, where he lived just down the street from a veterinarian. From the time Patterson was just a little kid, he worked for the vet as a kind of living incubator. When the vet had to perform a Caesarean on a bitch, he’d call Patterson, who’d stand by to assist. As the vet removed each tiny puppy from the mother’s womb, he’d place the newborn in Oscar Patterson’s outstretched hands, and Patterson would clean the puppy, warm it, cradle it, and feel it take its first breath right there in the palms of his hands. Although the bio didn’t say so, the little boy must have felt as if he’d given life to those puppies, as if he’d whelped them himself.

  I could have written my editor an article about the young Patterson and puppies, of course. The episode was nothing he’d confided to me. Even so, my knowledge created what felt like a weirdly personal bond between Patterson and me. Have you ever seen color photographs or, yet worse, a video of the birth of a human baby? Well, if I ever have a baby, there’ll be no cameras. That’s how I felt about Patterson, too: I didn’t want to see his surrogate canine motherhood spread out on the pages of Dog’s Life.

  “Anyway, Steve,” I went on, “what Bonnie really wants is something about how Patterson’s dog is so heartbroken that he hasn’t moved from the door since his master disappeared. Or how the dog’s suddenly started baying weirdly, and you can tell that he’s hearing his master’s voice.”

  “Does Patterson have a dog?” Steve asked.

  “Don’t ask me,” I said.

  “He has Burmese cats,” Steve said. “And an iguana.”

  “Damn. Maybe he has a dog, too.”

  “You know,” Steve said, “considering the circumstances, you sound kind of flip about all this.”

  He was right, of course. “Do I?” I said. “Yeah, I guess I do.” Rita … Remember Rita? Let me make a Cambridge introduction. She’s a psychologist in private practice. Rita, my friend and tenant, claims that when I sound heartless, I’m actually defending against the “potentially ego-disintegrative affect that is the legacy of your childhood history of repeated unresolved loss.” As may or may not be obvious, she means that my parents raised golden retrievers. Loss? One day the pups were there, the next day they’d been sold to strangers. What’s more, the one flashy trick that the remaining goldens never mastered was the ultimate show-off stunt of living forever. So I don’t like to have anyone just disappear. But who does?

  “What circumstances?” I asked Steve.

  “For one thing, Geri’s pregnant,” Steve said.

  “I don’t even know who she is,” I said.

  “The woman Patterson lives with. Geri Driscoll. She’s pregnant. Lee’s wife, Jackie, told me. But don’t pass it along, huh?”

  “Of course not,” I said. “But isn’t Patterson a little old to, uh, have to get married? I mean, at his age? He must feel sort of ridiculous.”

  Steve smiled. “He’s all of forty. But it’s not like that. I gather he seemed real happy about it.”

  As Rita would say, may I share a fantasy with you? I imagined that Geri would need a Caesarean and that Oscar Patterson, scrubbed and gowned for surgery, would reach his latex-gloved hands into her uterus to deliver the infant himself.

  “So why did he take off?” I asked.

  “Don’t ask me. I don’t know that it was voluntary.”

  “You probably didn’t ask,” I said. “You should’ve asked Lee Miner. Speaking of him, when do I get to meet him?”

  Steve lifted Rowdy’s eighty-five pounds of what you’d swear is steel-laced concrete off the table and onto the floor. “Would you not do that?” I said.

  All he did was laugh. Sometimes I think that Steve sees all dogs as wet and bloody all-but-unborn puppies he’s just delivered.

  Anyway, when we got to the waiting room, Kimi and Rhonda weren’t there, but on one of the plastic-covered benches sat a young woman with short, wiry black hair exactly like the coat of a Scottish terrier. What’s more, and I am not making this up, her face was long, her head was large for her body, her legs were really quite short, she wore black tights, and—I swear it’s true—her dress was Royal Stewart tartan. Her terrier—you guessed?—promptly flashed a good scissors bite, then let out a prolonged menacing growl, and, head and tail up, black eyes snapping, staunchly hurled himself, all twenty pounds, to the end of his red leash. Yes, this little dog, no more than ten inches at the withers, was joyfully picking a fight with an Alaskan malamute. Totally crazy, right? The little guy was waiting there for a dose of veterinary psychiatry. Wrong. This animal madness is known to Scottie fanciers as “real terrier character.”

  Rowdy’s ears perked up, hi
s hackles rose, and a gleam of delight sparkled in his eyes, but I could tell that he was more interested in enjoying the show than intent on getting into a real scrap. Even so, he jerked forward, but I spoiled the fun by calling him to heel. Probably because we weren’t in the obedience ring, he obeyed.

  Meanwhile, the woman was hauling in her dog and scolding him in the elated tones that terrier owners use when they chastise displays of what they privately consider the ideal temperament. Her voice was low and throaty: “Willie, that will do! Quiet! Hush!” She eventually succeeded in silencing Willie by dragging and shoving him around the corner of the reception desk and thus blocking his view of Rowdy. To Steve and me, she said brightly: “He really means it! He’s not kidding!”

  “Yes,” I said. “I believe you!”

  “He’ll take on anything! He’s a perfect fiend.”

  “Well, he’s awfully cute,” I said truthfully.

  “Don’t let his looks fool you,” she corrected me. In case I doubted her word, she added: “I’ve taken him to everyone! We saw Dickie Brenner once, and then we saw Lila Goldstein!” In case I still wasn’t convinced, she pursed her lips and said in a deep, chilling tone: “Twice!” Gazing down happily at Willie and evidently speaking as one with him, she added: “We didn’t like Mr. Brenner, did we? We’re never going back to him. And Mrs. Goldstein didn’t understand us. But that’s all right! Because now we’re going to the Monks of New Skete!”

  I know when I’ve been effectively demolished. You know who the Monks are, don’t you? Besides breeding German shepherds and writing first-rate dog-rearing books, they train dogs and give workshops. Any dog dreadful enough to have outdone his fellow couch destroyers, ankle nippers, rug soilers, lawn excavators, garbage stealers, and leash lungers to the extent of requiring three local consultations and the Monks of New Skete? Well, that dog had singled himself out as a world-class monster. I eyed Willie with respect.

  “Holly,” Steve said, “I’d like you to meet Jackie Miner. This is Holly Winter.” Steve’s an immigrant. He grew up in Minneapolis.