Dancing Dogs (20 page)

But none of that mattered. Helen was crazy about Julius, and she was so much happier now that she had a puppy. Whenever something bad happened at school, all she had to do was think about him and she’d smile. Each afternoon, they shared a pack of cheese crackers. And her parents conceded that they’d been wrong about Helen; she took wonderful care of her puppy. Julius slept with Helen every night, lay on her feet as she did her homework, curled up next to her while she read, walked and played with her, and spent school days looking out the window, waiting for her to come home. When she neared the house, she could hear his howls.

Helen and Julius’s connection changed her family. Her mother was still stunned by her daughter’s sudden evolution into what she called a “puppy commando.” As for her father, he seemed to look at Helen in a different way. He still wasn’t thrilled about having a dog in the house, and Helen understood now that that probably wouldn’t change. He really wasn’t a dog person, but that was all right. She was, and he was okay with that.

Julius quickly became a master at getting people to scratch his soft pink belly. And, if they didn’t, he would yowl. Helen said he was singing, and occasionally, they sang songs together. Her mother said it was the cutest thing she had ever seen, and her father loved to listen. During one of these impromptu concerts, the phone rang. Helen’s mother answered it and then held the receiver out to her daughter. “It’s for you,” she whispered. “It’s Iris, your friend from school.”

Her parents exchanged a look. It was the first “friend” from school to call Helen.

Helen glanced up at her mother, utterly confused, then took the phone. “Hi, Iris,” she said shyly.

“Hey, Helen,” the girl replied, her voice stripped of its usual edge. “I heard you got a puppy. Can I come over sometime after school to meet him?”

“Sure,” Helen said, a smile spreading across her face. “He’d like that.”

L
AURA
J
AMIESON DROVE THE SAME ROUTE TO HER JOB AS A
receptionist at a large suburban-Atlanta dental center for six years until the state decided to tear up the highway for a new overpass. This meant that for the next two years she would be getting off the main roads and driving through some rural landscape and farmland. The detour added almost forty-five minutes to her commute.

Some days she resented the construction, especially when it was raining or snowing. But some mornings, she didn’t mind because she got to look at pretty farms and pastures instead of traffic and malls, and she felt the pleasant sensation of being reconnected to nature, not an easy thing to do in booming Atlanta.

It was some time during the third week of driving her new route that she noticed the decaying old yellow farmhouse and a black and gray dog chained to a tree out front.
Laura was almost past the farmhouse when she saw the dog. Something seemed wrong. In her neighborhood, dogs were sometimes out in yards but almost never tethered to trees.

The image of the dog tied to the tree stuck in her mind and bothered her all day as she answered phones, filled out insurance forms, and shuffled people in and out of the dentists’ offices.

She had a dream about the dog that night. In the dream, the dog, maybe a German shepherd, was choking on the chain while hundreds of people drove by.

The next morning, Laura kept an eye out until she saw the farm looming up on the right after a new McMansion development. The farmhouse paint was peeling, and there were pieces of slate missing on the roof. The front and side yards were covered with junk—old tractors, plows, engines, trucks, and cars.

Laura pulled her Toyota Corolla slowly off to the side as she approached the farmhouse. It almost seemed abandoned, although when she looked off to her right, she saw an old red tractor far out in the field behind the house, black smoke belching from the exhaust pipe. She turned off the car engine and glanced off to the right. There was a giant old oak in front of the farmhouse, perhaps as old as the house itself, and tethered to it by the six- or seven-foot-long chain was the German shepherd, black and gray as she had remembered. He’d wrapped the chain partway around the tree and could only move a foot or two toward the road before being jerked back. She could see the water bowl well out of reach.

This dog was none of her business. But she got out of the
car and slowly approached him—she couldn’t remember when she’d last even touched a dog—and he seemed overjoyed to see her, barking, wagging his tail, lunging, then getting jerked back again by the chain. She worried he would break his neck.

She put her hand out. If she got bit, she had only herself to blame.

The dog licked her hand. She felt as if he’d been waiting for her, desperate for her to help him. She knelt down on the grass and stroked his head. He was panting heavily, and spittle had caked up on his jaw and chest. There were scabs and scars all around the dog’s neck from where he’d pulled against his collar. One was ugly, open, and raw.

She undid the hook that tethered the chain to the tree, then unraveled it from the trunk. She walked around the tree several times to do this, and the dog followed, almost eagerly. Then she refastened it. She leaned over to look at his threadbare collar. The tag said his name was Max. The rabies tag beneath was four years old.

“Max, come with me, come here,” she said softly, and he enthusiastically obeyed.

When the chain was straight, she leaned over to pat him, and he licked her hand again and looked at her expectantly.

She thought about her father, a career military man who’d been killed in a bomb blast in Iraq six years earlier. Mind your own business, he always said. But if you see a wrong, try to right it.

The two seemed to be in conflict sometimes, but she knew what he meant. She needed to try to help this dog.

She walked back to the car and got out a piece of paper from her briefcase and a pen. She wrote a note:

She left the note in the mailbox.

Laura thought about Max all day and called her best friend, Nicki. “That’s terrible,” she said. “You ought to report him. That’s abuse.” Nicki was deeply into rescuing things—rabbits, birds, dogs, cats, anything. Nicki would rescue a hippo if she found one in the road.

Laura said she didn’t want to get too involved. Maybe the farmer didn’t know. Maybe he would read the note. Still, on her lunch hour, she shopped for dog biscuits and an antibiotic ointment Nicki recommended in case the situation did not improve.

She went online and looked up the regulations on tethering. It wasn’t, she saw, illegal, unless the dog was choking or being deprived of food and water or on too small a lead. But this dog did indeed seem to be choking. She called the county hotline and left a message. No one called back.

When she drove home, it was dark and there was no sign of the dog.

The next morning, Max was not outside tied to the tree.

She didn’t see him for two more days, and she thought that perhaps she’d done some good.

But at the end of the week he was there again, the chain taut around the tree, so he could barely move.

She got out of the car and approached him, and he was overjoyed to see her again. She looked around—and seeing
no one—sat down next to the dog. She reached into her pocket for some biscuits and gave two or three to Max. He was happy to get them, scarfing them down.

“You’re lonely, I bet,” she said. “Nothing to do, tied to that tree all day.”

Max seemed gentle, happy to let Laura touch him and get close. She saw that his claws were long, his coat was thick and heavily matted, and there were bits of leaves and feces stuck in the fur around his haunches. He smelled awful, and his teeth were stained a deep yellow.

She saw that his neck wounds were worse, and one looked especially angry, swollen, and infected. She took some ointment and rubbed it under the collar. He pulled back and put his mouth gently on her hand, as if to stop her, but she didn’t stop, and he simply stared up at her, then gave up. She could hardly believe she had the nerve to do it.

She moved the water bowl closer. He drank eagerly.

That night, Laura went on to a rescue mailing list and posted a message about Max. The replies were fast and furious, and they all said the same thing.

“The dog is being abused,” one woman from Charlotte wrote. “You have to get him out of there. It isn’t stealing. It’s stopping abuse before something terrible happens.”

Laura had never stolen anything in her life.

No, she replied, she couldn’t. It wasn’t her dog.

“Then call the police,” the woman said. “And if that doesn’t work, give us the address and we’ll find somebody to get him out, if you won’t.”

Laura logged off the site.

The third morning, she got bolder. She walked Max around the tree and left another note for the farmer.

She peered around the back of the house and saw the tractor way off in the far corner of the pasture. Once again, she left the note in the mailbox.

When she got to the office that morning she called Animal Control again. There was no answer. So she called Nicki.

“Look,” Nicki said, “you can’t just leave Max out there. We’ve got to go get him. The rescue groups will take care of him. They have a sort of underground railway. They’ll get him out of there and to a good home up north.”

“You mean I should steal him?” Laura asked. “Because that’s what I’d be doing.”

“What are you going to do?” asked Nicki, “drive by there every morning and watch him choke to death a bit more each day?”

The next morning, Laura stopped by the farm. There was a longer chain than before, but Max had wrapped it around the tree again. He seemed happy to see her, jumping up and down so high she feared he’d choke himself. She dressed his neck wound, which looked better. He looked fed—wasn’t skinny or emaciated. But she thought his eye was swollen, as if he’d been beaten. She took the farmer’s name—Patterson—off the mailbox and wrote it down. She made sure Max was watered and fed and cleaned his wounds. He jumped up to lick her face.

It was hard for her to leave.

The next day she drove by the farm as usual, and forced herself not to look. When she came by on the way home, Max was not out in front.

She saw him the next three mornings and did not stop.

She refused to talk to Nicki about it anymore or answer the e-mails of the rescue group. Maybe it was time to leave Max alone. She’d done what she could do.

And yet she continued to dream about the dog every night.

A few days later, she called the number listed for Harold Patterson at the farm address and left a message. “Mr. Patterson, this is none of my business, I know, but I’m worried about your dog, Max, who’s tethered to that tree every morning. He doesn’t look well. Could you please call me about this?” And when she left her cell number, her voice and hands were shaking.

Friday, she pulled over to see if Max was okay, but he had wrapped himself so tightly around the tree that he appeared to be choking. His tongue was hanging down to the ground, and the collar had rubbed his wound raw again.

She unbuckled his collar and the dog jumped into her arms. Shaking, without even looking back, she led him to her car, opened the door, and Max lay down on the backseat.

She looked back toward the farm and thought she saw a curtain move in an upstairs window, but nobody appeared or tried to stop her.

As she started the engine, Max jumped into the shotgun seat, leaning over to lick her on the face. It was as if he’d been with her in the car a million times. He looked happy, at ease.

After calling her boss to take a personal day, Laura drove to a veterinary clinic near her home. She realized that she didn’t even have a leash, so she carried Max into the office.

The receptionist looked at her dubiously. “Do you have an appointment?” The woman said this wasn’t an emergency clinic, and they took animals only by appointment.

Laura had no idea what to do. She panicked, and then took Max back out to the car, putting him in on the passenger side before walking around to get in herself. Before she could get the key in the ignition, a young woman in a green surgical shirt came running out of the clinic. She looked no more than eighteen, Laura thought. She rolled down her window.

“I’m Marie, a vet tech here,” she said. “He was tethered, wasn’t he? You took him, didn’t you? It’s okay. I’m in animal rescue. He looks like he needs help.”

Laura didn’t really know what to say, so she simply nodded.

Marie stepped back and made a call on her cell. Then she returned to Laura’s window, putting a hand on her shoulder.

“You did the right thing. Be at the Roundtree Mall in front of Home Depot tonight at nine
P.M
. You know where that is? Bring any of his things, if you have any. And dog food. And if you can, a contribution for travel and gas. These women don’t have much money, and it’s expensive to drive the long distances they drive.”

Laura looked pleadingly at Marie. “I’m not a thief. I couldn’t leave him there. He looked so pitiful. I saw him every day.” Marie squeezed her hand. “It’s okay. I know. We’ll take care of it. You did a good thing. You don’t need to tell me anything more.”

And then she patted Max through the window and ran back into the clinic.

Laura didn’t have any of Max’s things, and she didn’t have any dog food. She left the clinic lot—Max riding shotgun again—and drove to a nearby pet store, where she bought a twenty-five-pound bag of kibble, a new collar and
leash, a clipper and brush, scissors, a dog bed, some balls, and a rawhide chew and put them in the back of the car.

L
AURA SPENT THE DAY
with Max. Walking him, talking to him, feeding him, dressing and bandaging his wounds. She brushed him carefully from head to tail, cutting out the burrs and clumps of twigs and grass embedded in his tail. He didn’t like having his long nails clipped, but he submitted to it.