Ruffly Speaking (17 page)

“Does your family breed malamutes?” I asked. If so, Ivan would have known how to pronounce
Kotzebue,
and, besides, Leah would certainly have told me, but I was so surprised that I didn’t think.

By now, Ivan was ineffectually running a porcupine brush over the top layer of guard hair on Rowdy’s tail. “My father’s dead,” he said.

“I’m sorry.” For Ivan. For asking.

“He died a long time ago. In Cameroon.”

I struggled to remember where Cameroon was. “Oh,” I said feebly.

Ivan looked up and stared at me. “Men don’t live as long as women,” he informed me. “Most men don’t. On the average. It’s a matter of probabilities.”

“I guess that’s true.”

“It is,” he said decisively.

I wondered whether to assure Ivan that his mother would live a long time. Leah had mentioned her, so I knew she was alive, but I was afraid that she might have some terminal illness I hadn’t heard about or that Ivan would inform me that one in every nine American women gets breast cancer or that he’d produce some other argument I’d be unable to rebut. I wished Rita were there to advise me. I was forced to follow my instincts. “Do you have a dog at home?” I asked.

He switched to Rowdy’s left rear leg, someone else’s territory, and began to brush vigorously. “No,” he mumbled.

“A cat?”

“We don’t have anything.” He made
home
sound like a vast empty space.

“Then how come you know what a Kotzebue is?” I asked a little too brightly.

“Because I read it in a book. My mother got it for me. It’s called
This Is the Alaskan Malamute.
It’s a pretty good book.”

“Yes, it is. It has good pictures.” The remark wasn’t as condescending as it probably sounds. The book
does
have good photos, including an extraordinary number of the legendary Floyd, Inuit’s Wooly Bully, my favorite of which isn’t one of the show-win shots but a snap of that gorgeous dog in the ring at Westminster in 1968. The handler isn’t even looking at the dog—he’s bending over to set him up for judging—but the great showman, the pretty boy, is glowing and grinning. That picture captures the independent show-off joy of the dog and of the whole breed. The photo also happens to highlight Rowdy’s almost uncanny resemblance to this extraordinary creature, but that’s incidental.

So I said that I too liked the pictures, and Leah, who was leaning over to supervise the application of grooming spray to Rowdy’s left side, overheard and interjected, “Ivan’s a little beyond picture books. Aren’t you, Ivan? He just finished
The Call of the Wild.
And not the abridged version, either.”

Critics complain about Jack London’s anthropomorphism or claim that he portrayed dogs not as they are, but as we wish they were. I disagree. I love Jack London. What’s more, I know the secret of his power. Jack London
did
write about dogs as they are: In their hearts, they are exactly as we wish them to be. No other writer has ever captured that identity with London’s passion.

“My mother says that it’s an example of anthropomorphism,” Ivan said, “because Buck thinks and remembers and everything, so he isn’t really a dog. He’s more like a person.”

“What do
you
think?” I asked.

“I think he’s a dog,” Ivan said.

“I do, too. And I always cry at the end.”

“I didn’t,” said Ivan, stiff-jawed.

“You did so, Ivan,” one of the girls told him. “I saw you.

“Everybody has feelings.” Leah spoke in the sanctimonious tone of progressive education. “So everybody gets to cry. Everybody feels sad sometimes, so everybody gets to cry. It’s all right.”

In lieu of responding to Leah, at least directly, Ivan trained those violet-blues on me and demanded, “Did you know that people have only twenty-three pairs of chromosomes? But dogs have thirty-nine.”

“I did know that,” I said. “Impressive, huh?”

“The chromosomes are in pairs, and so are the genes
on
the chromosomes, and if both the genes are just the same, in a pair, then that’s homozygous, and if they... if the genes are both recessive... if they’re homozygous recessive, then you see it! Like blue eyes, at least in people. And the way you remember that is easy, and that’s that it takes two to tango! And if one of the genes is dominant and the other’s recessive, then all you see is the dominant, like brown eyes, in people, but the gene for blue is still there! You just can’t see it. And the way you remember that is because nobody’s asked it to dance! It just has to sit there, because—”

“Because it takes two to tango,” I said. “I’ve never thought of it that way before.”

“Neither did Matthew,” Ivan said, shaking his head. “Until I explained it to him,” he added.

“Ivan, you aren’t getting to the undercoat.” I handed him a wire slicker. “What you need to do is sort of part the hair, like this. You’re right-handed, so you hold back a section with your left hand, and then you just brush out a little bit at a time. Okay? Only be careful not to scratch Rowdy’s skin or your hand with the wire bristles. Good! That’s it!”

“This isn’t very fascinating,” Ivan said morosely. “Well, it doesn’t have to be done all that often,” I told him. “And maybe you’d like it better if you’d got one of Rowdy’s sides or something. Maybe you can get someone to swap with you.”

“No one’s going to trade something good. Mee Lee got the head.” He glared at her. “She sucks up to everyone.”

“Mee Lee is doing a very good job, and she’s tall enough to reach. But you’re right. She is lucky. Almost anyone would rather get the head than—”

“Than a stupid dog bottom.” Ivan transferred the glare from Mee Lee to me.
“Anyone,”
he said, “would really rather get the whole dog.”

A kid worth a full-page spread. I’m afraid you’ll have to imagine the photo, but otherwise?

Ivy League Kennels

(“Bred To Think/Born To Talk”)

Proudly Introduces

IVAN FLYNN-ISAACSON

Eyes Clear Violet-Blue Prelim. IQ (9 years) Staggering

“The Terrible” is pictured taking Best Junior Mind at the Avon Hill Summer Specialty under respected judge Holly Winter. Already pointed, Ivan exhibits quality, type, soundness, and creativity—he has it all! And he’s a personality-plus kid, too! Watch for him! He’s a winner!

Exclusively Handled By:

HarvardUniversity Kennels

Cambridge, Massachusetts 02138

“Registered Professors’ Brats Since 1636”

18

 “So for once,” Rita conceded, “a dog is probably not a bad idea.”

Every child deserves a dog, but a child worth a full-page ad? A boy who’s lost his father? And who’s getting himself in trouble instead of getting himself in the ribbons for junior handling? I’d arrived home from the grooming demo at Avon Hill convinced that Ivan was a kid worth not just any dog, either, but worth a stellar representative of the breed of breeds, the dog of dogs, dog to the nth, the incomparable Alaskan malamute. I pay no higher compliment. Was Ivan ready, though? And which sex? I was leaning toward a bitch small enough for Ivan to control. Also, I had a hunch that it might do Ivan some good to discover that there was one creature on earth smarter than he was, and for raw IQ, the odds are in favor of the bitches. (Yes, in malamutes, too.) On the other hand, for a boy without a father, a male might be a better choice. So I’d asked Rita, who, for the first time since she’d got the damned hearing aids, had shown up at dinnertime with a collection of gourmet take-outs for us to share. By the time I’d finished telling her about Ivan, my kitchen table was littered with empty and half-empty plastic containers, and I was pouring boiling water onto freshly ground French roast Swiss-water-process decaf, which is what Cambridge psychotherapists drink except when they’re due to see really boring patients and want to be sure of staying awake. Mostly, though, therapists find their patients interesting and thus avoid what they consider to be the perils of caffeine. Writers love caffeine, of course. I, for example, regularly dose myself with the stuff. Tea is my usual drug of choice for the sustained-release effect needed to turn out free-lance articles and stories, but when my column is overdue, I switch to coffee, and when I’m up against a serious deadline, I hit my nervous system with a Puerto Rican wonder drug called Café Bustelo, and if you think that
café
is nothing more than the Spanish word for coffee, that’s only because you’ve never tried Bustelo,
siempre fresco, puro y aromatico,
the greatest writing tool since the invention of the stylus.

“For
once?”
I demanded.

“If dogs were the panacea you think they are...” To display the aid in her right ear, Rita lifted the hair that had grown almost long enough to give her a choice about whether to go public about her hearing loss. That’s how she explained it, anyway. It seemed to me that what really gave her a choice were the aids, not her hair. If she couldn’t hear whispered conversations or the turn signals on her car or a million other everyday sounds, it was perfectly obvious that she had a hearing loss, wasn’t it? How could she possibly keep it a secret? Only one way, right? Hearing aids.

“As a matter of fact,” I said, thumping Rita’s coffee mug onto the table in front of her, “Willie would make a not-bad hearing dog.” As such, he’d have to accompany

Rita everywhere, thus ridding me and my third-floor tenants of those damned home-alone barking fits, but I didn’t say so. “Willie is very sound-oriented, and he could hardly be any more alert. And Rita, they do that, you know. Sometimes you really can have your own dog trained to assist you. And if Willie doesn’t shape up—”

“Do me a favor,” Rita said sharply. “For once, for once, Holly, please do not rationalize. I know it works for you. Boom! Your hearing goes to hell, and what’s the first thing you say? ‘Hallelujah! The perfect excuse to get another dog! And now if I’d only go blind....’ Or that’s what you’d like to think. But the fact is that just like everyone else—”

“Could I remind you of something?” I took my place at the table and sipped some coffee. It wasn’t bad—not show quality like Bustelo, but good pet quality and altered, of course: no caffeine. “Rita, this is something you’re always saying, okay? Try assuming that we’re all doing the best we can. I am trying, and maybe I’m not succeeding, but I
am
trying, all right? So go easy.”

“I’m sorry.” She held the coffee mug in both hands as if she were about to offer it to me as an apologetic libation. “Holly, look. Sometimes it just doesn’t help to have you take things so... so lightly. Maybe eventually I’ll be ready for that, but I’m not now. It’s like... You remember that thing I got through the mail? That, uh, pamphlet on alien abduction. And all you thought...”

A month or two earlier, Rita had received a booklet designed to inform mental health professionals that zillions of people who might appear simply to have lost their minds had actually been abducted by beings from outer space. The booklet explains how I happened to become a repository of esoteric bits of information on the topic of alien abduction. Before reading it, for example, I’d always assumed that little green men were green, but they aren’t—they’re gray—and I would have sworn that
dreams
about UFOs were just that, dreams, whereas, according to the experts, alien abduction dreams, in marked contrast to all other dreams ever dreamt by human beings since the first time Adam fell asleep, aren’t really dreams at all, but accurate memories of real events. And while we’re on the topic of that report, let me warn you that if anyone ever asks whether you’ve heard or seen the word
trondant
and whether you know that it has a special meaning for you, just say no! It’s a trick question. Answer yes, and you’ll be dismissed as some joker who’s trying to claim credit for a UFO abduction, but who’s never actually gone farther from home than the suburbs of Cleveland, okay?

“So I didn’t take it seriously,” I admitted to Rita. “But neither did you! That’s why you showed it to me in the first place, because—”