Gaits of Heaven (13 page)

It was after midnight when Caprice and I got home
from Ted’s. The malamutes, Rowdy, Kimi, and Sammy, were asleep in their crates. Caprice asked whether Lady could stay with her. I was delighted and eventually found Lady, as well as India and my cat, Tracker, on the bed next to Steve, who had left my bedside light on for me. As quietly as possible, I led Lady into the hallway, and she happily trailed after Caprice. When I returned to the bedroom, India was on the floor next to Steve, and Tracker was on his pillow. Her eyes were ever so slightly open and, miraculously, she was purring. When I climbed in bed, instead of turning off the light, I took a few moments to enjoy the rare sight of Tracker relaxed and happy. She trusted no one but Steve. My love for him was so strong that I wanted to stroke his face: to feel his cheekbones under my fingertips, to trace his strong jawline. It seemed a magical opportunity to touch the impalpable: although I scoff at the idea of mystical emanations, Steve possessed a magnetism that made even the most frightened creatures feel safe. It seemed to me that he must be emanating the kinds of forces that don’t exist and that if I could have physical contact with him, I’d enter his energy field and be healed in places I wasn’t even wounded. Tracker, however, needed him more than I did. If I awakened Steve, he wouldn’t mind and would be able to go instantly back to sleep, but my hand would scare Tracker away. I settled for using my eyes in place of my fingertips. Within a few minutes, I felt peaceful and sleepy and overwhelmingly fortunate. I turned off the light and slept until eight the next morning.

I almost never sleep that late, but it was the kind of dark, rainy morning that almost anesthetizes dogs, and, in any case, Steve had left me a note to say that he’d given the dogs a quick trip out before he and Leah, together with Lady, India, and Sammy, had left for work. Now and then, I enjoyed a morning of regression to my unmarried life with my two original dogs. (
Unmarried
? With dogs, you’re not exactly
single
.) At nine-thirty, Rowdy and Kimi were dozing on the kitchen floor, and I was writing a column about custodial pets, as I called them, Tracker being a good example. I’d rescued her from a horrible life that had been about to come to a cruel end when I’d intervened. After restoring her to health, I’d done my best to find her a good home. Rowdy and Kimi had made my own far from ideal, but no one had wanted her, in part because of her disfiguring birthmark and torn ear, in part because of her unfriendly behavior. People want cute, sweet cats, preferably kittens. I’d reconciled myself to keeping her. Her life was, I believed, far better than none at all—and death
was
the alternative. The column was about what I’d learned from Tracker. The main lesson was humility: after a lifetime spent with dogs—and a few cats—I’d finally learned that I’d been taking far more credit than I deserved for sweet temperaments and loveable behavior. I’d have denied it. But I’d been doing it all along. By comparison with most other people, I am still a Higher Power when it comes to dogs, but I now know in my heart what I previously knew only in my thick head: that there are animal behaviors I can’t modify. Damn it all. But there are. I’d learned other lessons, too: provide vet care, food, grooming, physical safety, and emotional availability to even the ugliest and nastiest animal, do it all out of a sense of responsibility and none of it out of affection, and damned if you won’t end up feeling loyalty and even a weird kind of love for the custodial pet.

“People aren’t going to like this,” I told the dogs. “My readers are going to e-mail a lot of complaints about what a lousy cat owner I am. Even people who read
Dog’s Life
! But there are
dogs
like Tracker, and they deserve to live, too, and I’m not going to apologize for saying so.” The dogs’ beautiful brown eyes shone with eagerness and admiration. I sometimes wish that
Dog’s Life
were for dogs and not just about them. If that were the case, the publication would have to be edible to be popular. We could offer it in different flavors: liver, beef, or peanut butter. The canine subscribers, however, wouldn’t care what was printed on the delicious pages, so I’d be out of a job.

At noon, when Caprice appeared in the kitchen, I’d completed the first draft of the column. Her hair was damp from the shower, and she was dressed up for lunch with her father. Her outfit, like the one she’d worn the previous night, bore what I found to be a disquieting resemblance to a little girl’s dress. It was pale blue, and her shoes were white Mary Janes. Her weight, I thought, didn’t account for the voluminousness of her clothing, and it certainly didn’t explain her preference for pastel colors. Leah, with her red-gold curls, would’ve looked great in the pale blue traditionally recommended for redheads, but, in the hope of being seen as a young Simone de Beauvoir, she favored black, which really is slimming. I’d have been happy to see Caprice in black linen, which she did own. Holly Winter, fashion consultant: specializing in faded jeans, dog-themed T-shirts, and kennel clothes. I was no one to talk.

Although I offered Caprice a ride, she insisted on calling a taxi. After she left, I made myself some chicken salad and looked through the newspaper, which had one short paragraph reporting that Eumie Brainard-Green’s death was being treated as a homicide. A husband who organizes the kind of big memorial service I’d attended the previous night might be expected to run a long obituary for his wife, but there hadn’t been one before, and there was none in today’s paper. After lunch, I would’ve walked both dogs, but it was still raining. Walking Rowdy in wet weather is quick and easy because he considers water to be a threat to his survival: he takes two steps out the door, relieves himself, turns around, and comes back in. Instead of arguing with him, I left him in the dry house and walked Kimi. When we returned, I decided to listen to the CD that Eumie had sent. Imagery was nothing new in obedience handling. I owned a couple of old tapes and had been to a workshop about envisioning yourself standing tall with your dog in perfect heel position at your side. With my last golden retriever, the imagery had been simple to use: Vinnie was such an outstanding obedience dog that with her glued to my left side, I couldn’t help standing tall and proud. Then I got Rowdy, who was my first malamute. Let’s settle for saying that he introduced a major discrepancy between my mental picture of ideal performance and malamute actuality: it just isn’t useful to see pictures in your head of Velcro heeling if your dog is zooming over the baby gates and out of the ring, is it? It’s worse than useless. And worse than demoralizing. It’s clinically delusional. So, I quit imagining things and learned to train dogs who weren’t golden retrievers.

The new CD was nothing like the old tapes, which were all about maximizing potential and achieving the perfect performance. When I’d listened to the introductory section of Eumie’s gift, I decided that it would be safe for me to continue. For one thing, the woman on the CD didn’t speak in the voice of my late mother, which is to say, in the internal voice that was principally responsible for my ring nerves, the maternal whisper in my ear that corrected me for handler errors before I’d even had a chance to make them. In her day and, especially, from her perspective, dog training was mainly about catching the dog doing something wrong and making an unambiguous correction. When I was first training Rowdy with food, an instructor pointed out to me that I was hunching my shoulders and bending over him when I slipped bits of meat and cheese into his mouth, and I immediately knew that I was making a futile effort to block my mother’s view. In contrast, the woman on the CD didn’t seem to care whether I won or lost, or even whether I played the game well or badly. As I heard her, she wanted me to treat myself as I treated my dogs: with patience and kindness, and, incredibly, with the goal of having fun. My mother, I might remark, took a dim view of fun. I quote: “
Fun
? Anyone can have
fun
!”

So, following the instructions, I chose a quiet, comfortable place, namely, our bed, and stretched out on my back and listened. Because the imagery exercises weren’t specifically about showing dogs, the woman neglected to instruct me to have Rowdy and Kimi next to me, but I knew she’d approve. We, that is, Rowdy, Kimi, the woman, and I, began by taking deep breaths and then progressed to relaxing our bodies from head to toe. After that, we imagined ourselves in a secure, beloved place. We addressed our anxiety by breathing into it and breathing it out. And so it went. In saying that
we
did these exercises, I don’t mean to suggest that Rowdy and Kimi had anything remotely like ring nerves or that they complied with the woman’s suggestions. In fact, their true contribution was to share with me their calm, steady breathing, their loving presence, and their relaxed self-confidence. When she called us back to the real world, I felt hopeful about showing my dogs. And I shed a few tears for Eumie, who had wanted to help.

“Things can be corny and therapeutic at the same time, guys,” I told the dogs. “I’m in no position to sneer. I feel better now. That’s all that matters.”

When we got back downstairs, not just one but two squirrels were gorging themselves at one of Steve’s feeders, and not the black squirrels that I persisted in seeing as exotic and charming, but plain gray ones. Damn it! Steve deserved ivory-billed woodpeckers! Or failing that, Baltimore orioles. If there were any in Cambridge? If they visited feeders? Or cardinals, robins, nuthatches, downy woodpeckers, chickadees, anything but these thieving rodents. I rapped on the window. And was ignored. Out of love for Steve, I went to my computer, did a search, and printed out some pages about foiling squirrels. Steve was already using one kind of baffle, but the pages included a couple of potentially useful suggestions for new efforts. One was to use two different baffles, one above the other, on a pole. Another was to use a PVC pole or to put an ordinary pole in a length of PVC pipe.

Returning to the kitchen and looking out the window, I saw that one of the feeders had been emptied of seed and that the other was occupied by guess what—and not an ivory-billed woodpecker. This time, I simultaneously tapped the glass and hollered, thus managing to drown out the sound of Caprice letting herself and her father in through the kitchen door. I’d given Caprice a key and wanted her to use it, but I was embarrassed to be caught threatening a squirrel with destruction by malamute. The threat was idle, but I felt like a dope, especially because Monty Brainard was so irritatingly suave and urbane.

“No apologies necessary,” he said. “I can’t stay. I just wanted to thank you again.”

He was dressed in a conservative summer suit, this one dark navy—how many did he own?—and his tan hadn’t faded at all. Rowdy and Kimi wouldn’t, of course, induce pallor, but if they brushed against Monty, their hair would be all over that navy suit, and I’d feel obliged to remove it. Or try. The easiest way would be to don a pair of ordinary rubber gloves and, using moderate pressure, run my hands repeatedly downward on the fabric while saying…I could just hear myself:
Now, Monty, it may seem as if I’m using dog hair as an excuse to give you an intimate massage, but this method really is very effective
. Plus, the rubber gloves would make him think I was some kind of pervert.

Fortunately, instead of greeting Monty in their usual hair-depositing fashion, the dogs behaved oddly. They sashayed up to Caprice and gave her the big-brown-eyes treatment, but what they did with Monty was…nothing. Specifically, Kimi did not drop to the floor, roll over, tuck in her paws, fix her gaze on her victim, and await a tummy rub. What’s more, she remained silent. Rowdy, for his part, did not stack himself as if he were showing off for a judge. Like Kimi, he failed to present his underbelly, and he issued not a single
woo
. Although one of his fleece toys was right there, he did not offer it to Monty, and he did not vanish and reappear with other fleece tokens of welcome. I also want to note that neither dog showed any sign of perceiving Monty as a threat. Those signs are subtle, but I wouldn’t have missed them. Kimi didn’t station herself at my side and move her eyes back and forth between Monty and me. Rowdy didn’t position himself between Monty and me as if to create a canine barricade. In brief, the dogs did nothing. For malamutes, especially these two, to ignore a visitor was peculiar and unsettling. Still, for once, a dark suit escaped unfurred.

Monty Brainard, seeing nothing, noticed nothing.

“You don’t need to thank us,” I said.

“I wish I could stay to help out,” Monty said.

“He’s due back in New York,” Caprice explained. “I need to go to Ted’s to get some stuff. There’s not a lot there that’s actually mine, but I’ll feel better if I can get it out.”

“The cellar here is dry. There’s plenty of room.” I couldn’t recall having invited Caprice to move in with us for the summer, but Leah might have issued the invitation for an extended stay. Steve would have consulted me first, but, always with good intentions, Leah could be high-handed. “If you need help, I’ll go with you, or Leah will. She finishes early today. She’ll be home soon.”

“Caprice would be better off not going there alone,” Monty said. “Thank you.” Then, after kissing Caprice good-bye, he left.

Monty Brainard knew that his daughter shouldn’t go to Ted’s alone. And what was his response? To leave for New York. If Rowdy had decided that I was threatened, he’d have used his massive body to place a barrier between me and the source of danger. If I’d had to enter a place I feared, Kimi would have stayed right by my side. Rowdy and Kimi were, in fact, better dogs than Monty Brainard was a father. Indeed, when the occasion demanded it, they were excellent parents.