Black Ribbon (24 page)

“You know,” Cam said, “if there’s this thing about Phyllis here, I wonder if any of the rest of us … Has anyone found anything about the rest of us? Besides wishing Max luck?”

Almost simultaneously, Phyllis addressed her husband. “Donald,” she demanded, “would you please put that telephone to good use, and find out exactly
who
has done this to me!”

It was an odd little episode. Even for a handler like Cam who was used to being in the ribbons, High in Trial at Passaic must have been special. Furthermore, nothing in the guidelines for obedience judges would have prevented Phyllis from commenting on Nicky’s performance. Having awarded Nicky the score that put him High in Trial, Phyllis could have stood behind her own judging by saying how good he’d been. Both Cam and Phyllis, however, had changed the subject. It crossed my mind that Phyllis could have given Nicky a perfect score and later regretted that 200. A perfect score—that legendary 200—is, by AKC decree, “extremely rare if the Regulations are followed.” As the AKC goes on to warn judges: “When the owner of a dog which has received a perfect score feels that the performance deserved only 197½ points and knows just where the dog should have been faulted, it is evident that the standards of Obedience have been lowered by the judge.” Some judges never give perfect scores; the rest, almost never, and when they do, they do it very, very carefully. I wondered how close to perfection Cam and Nicky had really come at Passaic. Oh, and, of course, I wondered exactly what their score had been, but that means nothing. Obedience addict
that I am, I always wonder what people’s scores are—except, alas, my own. Those I know by heart, and all too well.

Eva’s scream interrupted my thoughts. “Oh, shit! Listen to this!” She brandished one of the photocopies. Lowering it to eye level, she read,
“Black ribbon.
What the hell does that mean?”

The term isn’t all that common. I started to explain: “A tribute to a dead—”

“Black ribbon,”
Eva repeated indignantly. “Listen to this! It says:
Condolences to Eva Spitteler on the sudden loss of her three-year-old Labrador retriever, Benchenfield Farmer’s Dog.”
Eva’s voice dropped. “That’s Bingo.”

“No kidding,” someone muttered.

Eva resumed her reading.
“It’s always sad to report one of these, especially when the tragedy could so easily have been prevented.”
Eva’s face, never exactly attractive, was contorted with rage. “What the shit’s that supposed to mean? That I left him shut up in a hot car? What the—”

When my mother died, all the dog magazines wrote about her, and every time I came across the words of sympathy, I felt as if I’d just heard news that couldn’t possibly be true. Again and again, I’d read, “With the passing of Marissa Winter, the Fancy mourns the loss of a great lady,” and I’d want to shout, “No! Not true!” But then my eyes would fill with tears, and time after time, I’d learn of her death for the first time. The death of a dog, of course, is like the death of a mother, but simpler, therefore much worse, like the death of a child, pure grief. After my last golden, Vinnie, died, every card, every note, every phone call, every hand on my shoulder broke the news again. What truly consoled me was Rowdy, a dog totally different from Vinnie, but a dog, even so. And Marissa? Many dogs, one mother.

Eva’s rage? The familiar outrage:
No! Not MY dog! It’s a hoax! It’s a cruel hoax.
In Eva’s case, it really was a hoax. The feeling, I thought, was identical.

Looking down at the photocopy on the table, I scanned for familiar names. Mine, maybe? Not that I could find. But Don Abbott’s was there, and so was John R.B. White’s. I put my finger on it and asked Cam whether she’d seen it. She nodded. The item was trivial. According to
Dog Beat
, John R.B., her husband, was widely considered a young Turk at the AKC and a threat to conservative types like Don Abbott. If so,
Dog Beat
wondered, why had John R.B. and Don Abbott been spotted together at so many shows this year? The only noteworthy feature of the item, I thought, was the absence of any reference to Phyllis Abbott’s supposed death. But the inconsistency wasn’t surprising;
Dog Beat’s
editing was always lousy.

Cam turned a few pages and asked, “Did you see this?” Her perfectly filed nail tapped the paper midway down the page.

“No,” I said.

“Well, read it.”

Most of
Dog Beat’s
columns appeared under pen names. No self-respecting writer would want to admit to having produced such trash, but then no self-respecting writer would have thought about contributing to
Dog Beat
in the first place. I suspected that the real purpose of the pseudonyms wasn’t so much to let the writers save face or to let them escape responsibility for what they wrote as it was to fool the readership into believing that
Dog Beat
employed a multitude of contributors. All ten or twelve toxic columns, I thought, actually oozed from the slimy digits of only two or three people. In truth, what offended me about
Dog Beat
, in addition to its viciousness, was its blatant failure to fill what I’ve always perceived a major gap in the dog-writing market. Aspiring canine journalist, are you? Well, the next time you find yourself stuck in line at the supermarket, run your eyes over the racks of tabloids, and read therein your own future. Indeed,
The Canine Enquirer!
Really, consider the possibilities. Each issue would practically write itself.
Day-Old Siamese-Twin Basenjis Whelp Litters of Three-Headed Pups. Amazed owner says, “And
they’re just the sweetest little bitty things you ever saw.”
Basic tabloid Elvis reincarnation and miracle-cure story, with dog, of course: “
Jailhouse Rock” Crooning Coonhound Cures Caddie Dealer’s Cancer.
More?
Brave Brittany Battles Alien Captors, Saves Self and Cairn Companion
, except when you read the story, it turns out that the whole thing happened in 1932, but it did happen, right? That’s what counts. The Royals:
Queen’s Corgis, Caught in Secret Love-Nest, Snub Di.
That one’s a little disappointing, I’m afraid. The so-called love nest was just an ordinary cedar-filled dog bed; the breeding was, in fact, carefully planned; dogs being dogs, it didn’t take place in any kind of bed or nest at all; and the corgis, sensitive to their owner’s true sentiments, had never much liked Di to begin with. Oh, and don’t neglect celebrities.
Exclusive Poolside Photos Show Latest Lassie’s No Lady.
None of them have been, actually—male collies have better coats for the role—but the pictures’ll be a real plus, good and graphic, blurred, too, obviously shot from the depths of shrubbery.

Anyway, the column to which Cam directed my attention—“Nose to the Dirt,” this journalistic gem was called—appeared under the shamelessly plagiarized nom de plume of Snoopy, according to whom—
Dog Beat’s
, not Charles Schultz’s—Sara Altman and Heather Richards were starting their own agility camp next year. Had Max McGuire heard the news? And if Waggin’ Tail made it through its first year, would Max have any staff left? Not according to the rumors that had reached
Dog Beat.

Maxine must have read the item at the same time I did. “Heather,” Max demanded shrilly, “is this true?”

Heather, who’d supplied herself with coffee, took a casual sip. “It’s just something we’ve discussed.”

“Well, not with me!” Maxine snapped.

In what I took to be an effort to deworm Max’s mood with a purgative dose of reality, Eric reminded her that
Dog Beat
wasn’t exactly a reliable source of information. Phyllis was
obviously alive, he pointed out. So was what’s-her-name’s dog. But as Max correctly told him, Heather and Sara hadn’t denied the rumor. Far from it! Hadn’t Eric just heard …? Was that what
he
called loyalty? Was it
his
idea of loyalty, too? Maybe Eric was
also
planning …

Eric spoke calmly. “Max, running a camp’s not on my agenda.” He excused himself from the table and rose. In a huff, Max followed him. Don and Phyllis, who’d been muttering about who at
Dog Beat
was really to blame and how best to deal with the situation, were now giving voice to long lists of people they needed to call. With Don stating that he’d track the damn thing down, they departed. Everyone else was leaving, too. I’d had all the human company I needed for one day. I started to slip out of my chair.

In back of me, Heather addressed Eva Spitteler:
“You
did this, didn’t you? I know you did.”

Sara, chiming in, said,
“All
of it! The cards, the scary stuff, everything! And you know what? Everyone knows you did it, too, because you’re the only one here who’s mean enough. You just can’t stand to see anyone else have fun, can you?”

For the third time, the force hit the back of my chair, but I’d just squeezed out, and I escaped the impact. As I crept away, Eva was loudly defending herself. “You know what you’re doing? You’re scapegoating me! And the reason is, you’re just jealous, is all, because you’re all trying to make a living in dogs, and not one of you’s got a clue of how to do it. Let me tell you something. The real problem here isn’t me; it’s Maxine. She’s greedy, and she’s stingy, and she’s not even good at covering it up. She doesn’t know the first thing about running a business or about allocating resources. She can’t plan, she can’t make decisions, she can’t follow through. And she’s stupid: She made a whole lot of promises she couldn’t keep. This whole damn camp is completely disorganized. But, hey, everyone’s buddy-buddy with good old Max. So who gets
the blame?
Me.
And I paid good money to be here, and all I’ve got for it is your shit.”

What popped into my mind was, of all things, a line from a poem I’d had to memorize in high school: “The world is too much with us; late and soon.…” Wordsworth. I remembered his first name: William. His country: England. England, fair England, where the official church is the C of E and the true religion is the worship of dogs. Not just England, either! Taken together, the British Isles constitute a devout Bible-belt of fervent canine fundamentalism, country after country, county after county, district after district pledged to the Irish setter, the Irish wolfhound, the Scottish deerhound, the pointer, the foxhound, the Border collie, the Welsh corgi, both Cardigan and Pembroke; terrier after incredible terrier, Irish, Welsh, West Highland White, Norwich, Norfolk, bull, Bedlington, Dandie Dinmont, Staffordshire, Kerry blue, soft-coated wheaten, Skye, Sealyham, Manchester, Lakeland, and the others, present and past; the Old English sheepdog, of course, and the collie, smooth and rough, the Shetland sheepdog, and the toys, too, the Yorkie, the English toy spaniel, and, speaking of spaniels, the Sussex, the Welsh springer, the English springer, and … Well, if I haven’t gotten to your breed, sorry, but the list is almost endless and, even if complete, wouldn’t tell me what I didn’t know, which was, of course, the particular breed favored by Wordsworth, he of late and soon. But I knew what mattered: I knew that when Wordsworth wrote, “The world is too much with us; late and soon,” he meant that he’d had it with human beings and was desperate for the company of dogs.

As was I. I almost ran back to the cabin, and as soon as I got inside, I practically yanked the latch off Rowdy’s crate in my eagerness for contact with his pure-hearted goodwill. Never lived with a malamute? Well, according to the official standard, the Alaskan malamute is “playful on invitation, but generally impressive by his dignity after maturity,” a description
that illustrates the divergence of Dog English from what is absurdly called Standard English, as if there were anything normal, or, God forbid, desirable about stripping the language as a whole of the rich phraseology of the fancy. But as always, back to the Alaskan malamute, Rowdy, in this case, quintessence of the standard, “playful on invitation, but generally impressive by his dignity after maturity,” meaning in Standard English, that
after
maturity, which is to say, in advanced old age and beyond, he’ll display an air of noble reserve, but that until then, he’ll fool around at absolutely anyone’s invitation, including his own, which is to say that Rowdy bounded from his crate with a furry toy whale in his mouth, gave it a hard shake, dropped it, rose on his hindquarters, rested his snowshoe paws in my outstretched hands, and cleansed my face and soul of that icky residue, the grime of too much with us, late and soon.

“You want to go out?” I asked him. “Go for a walk?” Rowdy doesn’t fetch his leash the way Vinnie did, but he understood what I meant and headed for the door. I snapped on his flex lead.

At the end of the dark afternoon, the sun had set by swelling to ten times its former size, turning a garish shade of raspberry, and exploding into the tops of the mountains like a flambéed dessert blowing up in the faces of the gods. Now, hours later, the moon’s balm soothed the burns. Low to the ground, twin sets of lights twinkled, nighttime safety collars around the necks of what looked like little phantom dogs. The air was fragrant with pine. Enforcer of the buddy system, I wandered to the dock, led Rowdy to the end, looked, listened, and nowhere found a sign of a swimmer. Strolling toward the main lodge, I saw the burning cigarettes of three or four people sitting on the stairs. Like a patriotic cartographer intent on charting unknown land and claiming it for his own, Rowdy marked tree after tree.

“Could we get down to business here, buddy?” I asked him.
“Be a good boy! Hurry up!” Code words, those. Kimi obeys them. Rowdy does, too, but not at the cost of cutting short a good walk. Or maybe he knew that there was no real hurry. He wasn’t due in the show ring, and my only appointment was with a soft pillow. I liked the feel of the night air, and I liked letting Rowdy mark his trees. He was a dog being a dog. Maxine passed nearby, the massive Cash on lead. I said hi and moved on. Here and there, other dog walkers meandered, some in silence, some in small murmuring groups. I missed Kimi. With only one dog, I felt unbalanced, incomplete. But I missed no one’s company but hers, not even Steve Delaney’s. When Rowdy had charted our route away from the lake and back to the wooded stretch that separated the cabins from the bunkhouse, I heard a couple of cabin doors bang lightly. A distant voice said something I couldn’t really hear.