Dancing Dogs (25 page)

Karen had enjoyed swiping credit cards before Pharma-Rite
installed the new machines that allowed the customers to swipe their own cards. Truth was, she liked it when the electronic cash system went down—which it did frequently—and you actually had to look at the prices of things and talk to people. She noticed that the kids who worked in the store moved from one automated job to another, reading instructions off screens. They didn’t really know how to talk to people. They let the wands do their talking and thinking, and barely muttered the required “Have a good day.” That was a shame, Karen thought.

Sometimes, waving the wand back and forth, she felt like a robot with no real reason to know the products or talk to humans. She always asked people if they’d found what they wanted, or if she could help them in any way, but customers would keep coming to the Pharma-Rite even if she didn’t. The company had recently installed a fully automated checkout system that digitally tallied shoppers’ purchases. The total—reduced by a 15 percent discount—flashed on a screen, and the customer paid with a swiped credit card. People bagged their stuff themselves. Karen had no doubt that that was the future, but she fought the idea that companies no longer cared about people and people no longer cared about companies. You make your own story, she kept telling herself. And she cared.

Karen worked to remain outgoing and helpful. Since the recession, more and more people came to Pharma-Rite to ask health questions and buy over-the-counter medications. They couldn’t afford to go see doctors or fill prescriptions. The staff wasn’t supposed to give out medical advice, but sometimes you really couldn’t help it. Karen would suggest skin creams, effective headache medications, and the stuff
that seemed to work for colds, flu, eczema, sore joints. Rather than recommend medicines outright, which was a fireable offense, she simply said it worked for her.

And she had a special radar for the dog people. When customers saw the locket with Ernie’s photo hanging from her necklace, they would often take out their cell phones and show her pictures of their own dogs or cats. She liked that. Her cell had a dozen photos of Ernie, and she could whip it out as fast as anybody.

Karen had started bringing Ernie to work over a year ago. His obsessive barking was driving the neighbors crazy, and they had threatened to call the police. Karen wasn’t about to crate him (like that would keep him from barking anyway) or use one of those anti-barking spray collars, even though the vet said it was perfectly safe. Her husband, Dan, who thought Ernie was a dreadful pain in the ass, said they couldn’t leave him alone in the house any longer.

This annoyed Karen for several reasons. A year earlier, Dan had suffered a mild heart attack. Minutes before it happened, Ernie had started to bark furiously. It was obvious to Karen that Ernie had sensed something was wrong and was trying to warn Dan. But her husband was unappreciative, even ungrateful. “Karen,” he scoffed, “that dog barks at everything.”

Since then, Karen had watched Ernie’s reaction to people closely, and she firmly believed he could sense things others couldn’t. She had read about dogs who could sniff out cancer, predict death, warn of strokes. About dogs who saw right through people, who were spiritual and profound. She truly believed Ernie might be one of those dogs. She had faith in him, and believed she alone understood what he was trying to communicate.

But despite Ernie’s special gifts, Dan would not back down about leaving the dog alone in the house. So Karen had rearranged the back of the car, laid out dog and cat beds, bones and catnip toys, water and snacks. Ernie could bark all he wanted in the parking lot across from the store, and nobody would care. On her breaks and lunch hour, she would go out and visit the “odd couple,” as she called them, walking Ernie and letting Napoleon sit on the hood of the car, where she glowered at the world.

K
AREN
’
S FIRST CUSTOMER
of the day was a school-bus driver getting some groceries from Pharma-Rite’s new “Food Corner.” He bought a six-pack of beer, two packs of bubble gum, two glazed donuts, barbecue potato chips, an apple wrapped in cellophane, six $3 lottery tickets, and a pack of cigarettes.

“And do you have any Tums?” he asked.

“Duh!” muttered Karen under her breath, but he didn’t hear her.

Sometimes, when she was out of earshot of the bosses, she joked that she had figured out Pharma-Rite’s secret corporate strategy: Sell a lot of chips, hot dogs, candy, cigarettes, and beer so that people would come in for prescriptions when they got fat and sick. There was no health-food department at this pharmacy.

“Should we be selling cigarettes?” she would ask Jim, who just shrugged and said it was up to Corporate. Jim was not a guy to question Corporate. He was a large nervous man who desperately tried to keep up with the stream of regulations, ideas, and cost-saving strategies from Corporate. They never stopped coming.

Truth was, prescriptions were only a small part of what
Pharma-Rite was about these days—they sold food, toys, cosmetics, soaps and detergents, you name it. Even pet food and toys.

“Hey, can I interest you in some of our new bottled water?” Karen asked the bus driver.

“No,” he said groggily. “I don’t buy water.”

That was sort of the tone of things. She wasn’t selling many bottles.

Karen was lucky to have her cashier’s job. She needed it. But she was also fearful about her future. Employees were entitled to health-care benefits after four years at Pharma-Rite, and Karen, along with everybody else, noticed that people tended to get laid off or downsized right before their benefits kicked in. Any kid off the street could perform most of the jobs at Pharma-Rite with little training and less pay. Why keep on the employees who had earned benefits?

Karen was in her fourth year at the store, and life was catching up—her mother was sick, Dan’s legs were getting worse, and jobs were vanishing as fast as the ozone layer. She needed to get one of the department-manager slots that the company was posting. The Warrensburg store was one of the smaller ones in the region, dwarfed by the volume done in Saratoga or Glens Falls. That’s why the Pharma-Rite Regional Bottled-Water Contest was looming large for Karen, and for her boss, Jim.

The company was launching its own bottled-water brand. Part of the sales push was the contest. Employees who sold the most bottled water that week went to the top of the list for promotion. And Karen was going for it. Walmart wasn’t hiring, and the only other jobs around were eighty
miles down the thruway in Saratoga, and there weren’t many of those.

In their apartment in Hudson Falls, Karen had been driving Dan crazy practicing various sales pitches, getting her voice “up,” and memorizing the company pamphlets extolling the miraculous benefits of their clean, pure water. It had to be better than beer and cigarettes, she thought, practicing one of her pitches on Ernie.

She’d adopted the dog at a local Adirondack animal shelter after some summer people abandoned him outside the cottage they had rented, just dumped him out on the road. A neighbor saw them do it and could hardly believe it. He called in their license-plate number. A trooper actually pulled them over on the New York State Thruway heading to New Jersey. “What dog?” they said. They might have seen one wandering around, but they knew nothing about it. It wasn’t theirs. There was nothing the trooper could do. Maybe Ernie’s abandonment explained why he was so verbal, so indignant. Perhaps he was still seething at the injustices done to him.

“Their loss, my gain,” Karen said of the awful people who had abandoned Ernie. She and the dog had bonded instantly, and she brought him everywhere but the doctor’s office and her mother’s nursing home. She loved him to death, and he had become pretty much a one-human dog. He was either with Karen or barking in protest that he wasn’t with Karen.

“Ernie,” she had told him that morning, “I need to win this contest. Get that promotion. Get us noticed by Corporate.” She didn’t want to be one of the many checkout girls who vanished from Pharma-Rite after four years. She wanted
to make it past that expiration date. She wanted to get benefits, better pay, and some job security, if such a thing even existed. Maybe even get to go to the annual meeting in Fort Meyers, Florida, one day, or win a cruise.

In the locker room, the other girls had wished one another luck as they pulled their hair back in buns and ponytails and put on their blue vests. Karen was competing with Susie from Cosmetics and Jamie, a pill counter in the pharmacy, but her real competitors probably worked at the larger stores in the region. Still, Susie and Jamie were both cute and quite a bit younger than Karen, who was in her mid-forties. They had boyfriends and pals who came by all the time. They might draw more of a crowd than she did.

The first day of the contest was a disaster for Karen. She called Dan on the cell and told him that nobody seemed to want bottled water from Pharma-Rite, even at $5.99 a case. Jamie’s boyfriend came into the parking lot on his motorbike and bought a couple of cases. Karen hadn’t come close to that. On her break, she had gone out to see the odd couple and walked Ernie around the block. She didn’t take him as far as she usually did, wanting to get back and sell some bottles.

Some of her regulars bought a few, but by early afternoon, she had barely sold a case.

Tuesday was not much better. Jim came to check on her numbers and he shook his head. He was nervous, unhappy. “Your competition is outselling you,” he said, “and they aren’t selling much.” Karen prided herself on being upbeat, but Jim was a difficult person for even her to like. He seemed to care about nothing but his faraway bosses and their business goals, and was careful not to get too close to any employees—they might not be around for long. Still, Karen was easy to
talk to, and Jim sometimes confided a bit in her. “I’ll be honest with you—it would be nice to beat out Saratoga and Glens Falls. Get Corporate to notice us. We aren’t exactly their busiest store around here, if you know what I mean.”

Karen knew what he meant. Stores that were not the busiest ones often vanished overnight, taking everybody’s jobs with them. Jim said the chain’s regional manager was a big fan of Chairman Mao of China, and he believed in getting rid of the weakest links every now and then to keep the chain strong. It was a chilling management philosophy, all the more so because Karen knew it was true.

Karen’s sister had stopped by and picked up a few bottles, to be nice. Susie gave her a condescending smirk. Everybody knew she wasn’t selling any water. If this kept up, she’d have to start looking online for jobs in Saratoga or Lake George. Karen was discouraged, which didn’t happen often. Her mother had taught her that being discouraged was like opening up a dark door—it let awful stuff in. You just didn’t do it.

On Wednesday morning, Dan called her on the cell to wish her well. “Maybe you can put that useless dog to work,” he said. “He drinks a lot of water.”

She knew his suggestion had only been a snide joke—he was not a huge fan of Ernie—but it set something off inside her head. She took the dog for a long walk out by the cement plant, where the two of them looked up, as they did every day, at the giant Days Without Accidents or Injuries sign that towered over the neighborhood. The cement plant had not had an accident or injury in more than one thousand days, and that meant something to Karen. She saw the sign as something akin to a spiritual site, a place of safety and stability in the world.

…

O
N
T
HURSDAYS
Karen worked a later shift, four
P.M.
to midnight, so Jim and the other early employees (she suspected that Jim lived in the office at the back of the store, as she had never seen him come or go, only work) were surprised to see her pull into the Pharma-Rite parking lot at six
A.M
. She’d left Napoleon at home, and the grumpy cat had seemed more than pleased to stay.

Ernie, however, was sitting in the backseat, yapping away.

She had gussied him up, giving him a bath, which he hated, putting sweet-smelling powder on him, and placing a yellow Hawaiian lei (a souvenir from her sister’s last trip to Disney World) around his neck.

Jim frowned. He didn’t like dogs in general and Ernie in particular. Company policy and state health laws banned them from the store, and Jim didn’t even like them hanging around the parking lot, which is why Karen always parked across the street. Jim insisted that somebody could get bit, or worse, the dog would take a dump—not the image Pharma-Rite wanted to project.

“You can’t leave him this close to the store,” he said.

Karen motioned for Jim to step aside.

“Listen,” she said. “Do you want to win the Regional Bottled-Water Contest or not?”

Jim’s eyes widened. It would be a huge coup for a small store in Warrensburg to beat the busier Pharma-Rites in Glens Falls or Saratoga. One of his buddies down at the Glens Falls store had e-mailed him to tell him that Corporate had called to chastise the manager for not pushing the contest. They were ticked about the sluggish sales of their new water line in its first week.

“Just bear with me,” said Karen. She went to the stationery section and came out with a blank cardboard poster and some crayons, then went and got Ernie out of the car. He sat barking, wagging his tail.

She scribbled on the poster and then set it up in the parking lot against the rear wall of the store.

“Psychic Dog,” it read. “Let Ernie tell your fortune. Free with the purchase of two bottles of water.”

Before Jim could close his mouth, there were six people in line.

“Is this for real?” asked a mom with two kids in tow. “I saw a dog like this on Oprah.”

“Try it,” challenged Karen. “Ask him anything you want to know about your future.”

The woman walked up to Ernie, who looked up at her. She glanced back at her kids, closed her eyes, tilted her face toward the sky, and then took a breath.

“Will my husband get a job?” she finally asked. Ernie looked up at her and began to bark.

“Wow,” said the woman. “It’s like he really listened to me. What did he say?”