Sleeps with Dogs (9 page)

I peeked my head through the window to check on the dogs and saw that there was also a chair adjacent to the open window, further enabling Ash's access from the patio. My deep and heartfelt eye-rolling was interrupted by Ash starting to take the trademark squat. I caught on just as Maddie did, and I could see her anticipating the treats he was about to drop for her to gobble up.

Even in my short career of dog walking and animal nannying, I'd already encountered many dogs with strange and sometimes dangerous eating habits. There was the American bulldog who ate
his owners' gym socks at every opportunity. Or the corgi who preferred his dry food with a helping of raw broccoli and cauliflower on top. I pet-sat one weekend for a Rottweiler that I dubbed the Mulcher. She had a penchant for eating the dried leaves that littered the back patio, where she spent her days. Then she'd come inside and leave a loose, detritus-filled dump on the carpet. This I cleaned up with the industrial-grade Hoover the owners helpfully left out for this very reason. In all of these instances, the owners warned me in advance of their pets' unusual predilections, which helped enormously in both preventing a problem but also in understanding what the hell I was looking at when I showed up to take care of said pet and clean up his or her messes.

In the instance of Penny, a newly adopted Lab-terrier mix puppy, I hadn't gotten the benefit of full disclosure. I was running blind when, on one of our neighborhood walks, Penny started to drag her butt on the grass. Worms? I didn't think so. I knew from her paperwork she'd been spayed and vaccinated and microchipped prior to adoption. Along with all of those procedures, deworming was standard. Yet another detail I'd gathered during my glory days at the pet store, since I was the one who administered the thick yellow tonic to the incoming animals, and then got to flush the worms down the industrial disposal when they came out the other end.

Farther along on our walk, Penny started dragging again, and I noticed that something bright red was crowning beneath her perky tail. Blood? Intestines? I was freaking out. I got down on my hands and knees for a better look, as more and more red bloomed from her bottom.

Upon closer inspection, I could see that this was something inorganic. It had a little white tag on it, the tiny lettering hard to make out. I then did what one should never, ever do in this situation. Chalk it up to inexperience, but I bagged my hand, and I pulled.
Lucky for me, the object had not become entangled in Penny's innards, and it came out cleanly (a relative term) in my hand.

JLo Intimates,
the tag read. I was holding the owner's undigested thong in my hand.

I knew from my days at the pet store that there's a technical term for Maddie's own dietary anomaly. We had many an appalled dog-owner coming into the store to complain about this unattractive habit some dogs have of eating shit, a condition called coprophagia. We'd direct the customer to aisle two, top shelf, where they'd find tablets for this affliction. I can't say how helpful the pills were in deterring their dogs, but they certainly didn't work on our darling wolf mix. Bless her, this disgusting habit absolutely tore her already-sensitive stomach apart. Whether it was her own, or anyone else's, she was indiscriminate in her partiality to poop. And if I didn't move quickly, she was about to make a snack of Ash's.

“No!” I shouted, leaping through the open door to place myself between Ash and Maddie. I didn't have time to grab the shovel in my mad dash, so I collared Maddie and took her with me to collect the pooper-scooper. But first, I sat down on the patio chair and looked into her precious face.

“Hey, you know better! No, ma'am! No poop for you.” It was extremely hard to resist kissing her soft muzzle, but this was not a time for positive reinforcement. I was being as stern with her as I could manage, resisting her charms with all my might. She was a love, but this behavior had to stop.

Maddie was on a very strict diet of boiled chicken and plain white rice, a combination that seemed to meet the three-prong requirements of going gentle on her stomach, providing protein for her wolf half, and satisfying the domesticated dog in her that could process carbs with alacrity. If she weren't possessed of such a tender
tummy, I feel sure she could have taken down all kinds of meat. I'd worked with a woman who regularly fed her German shepherd raw steaks and swore by the benefits for the dog, if not the expense, of such a high-quality regimen.

This rice-and-chicken diet, while mostly successful in keeping Maddie fed and comfortable, her stools healthy and firm, was all-too-often interrupted. If not by the shit-eating she engaged in, then when, for example, she figured a way to get into Ash's delectable puppy kibble. Or the food of Susan's many cats, whose dishes sat out on the front patio, tempting Maddie every time she passed by.

I kept a firm grip on Maddie's collar, and we returned to Ash's pile. She was way too fast for me, and there was no way I could let her go and clean up after him before she beat me to it. I quickly scooped up the offending mess and only released her collar once I'd dumped it into the trash can left out on the patio for just that purpose.

Susan tried her very best. I knew that. She loved Maddie, and now Ash, fiercely. She closely followed the recommendations given by myself and the colleagues with whom I shared Maddie and Ash's care. Except when she couldn't. Susan worked irregular shifts and long hours, and she relied on Trevor to manage the house and the dogs in her frequent absences. This meant the fifty-pound bag of Ash's food was often left out and open in the kitchen, where Maddie could dip her face right into it like a horse's feed bag. Or else Ash was fed in plain view of an uncrated Maddie, setting him up to be body slammed aside by his much larger and hunger-motivated housemate.

What seemed at first like carelessness or ineptitude on Trevor's part was looking more and more like sabotage—of Susan's intentions, us dog walkers' efforts, and Maddie's overall health and wellness.

All I really knew of him was that he went to community college, which explained his unpredictable schedule. He rarely spoke to me, and he made eye contact even less than that. When I would make an effort at conversation, or ask him questions about the dogs, I rarely got more than a mumbled reply.

The backyard was basically a grassless wasteland of dust and rocks, enclosed by a ten-foot fence. In the corner, there was a stand of bamboo that Maddie loved to hide in. She'd carved out tunnels in the thicket that we couldn't get to, and she would go to the bathroom there, where we couldn't swoop and scoop right behind her. It was very frustrating. Try as we might, my fellow dog walkers and I had not yet succeeded in getting Susan to chop it all down. Susan had agreed that it needed to happen, of course. On multiple occasions. She said Trevor would do it.

And so there we were, bamboo forest intact.

I threw a filthy, fuzzless tennis ball for the dogs a few times to get some of their energy out and refreshed their water from the hose coiled at the side of the house. They each took a long drink before we headed out on our walk. Both dogs were enthusiastic pullers, still learning how to heel on command—though with enough practice, they'd eventually do it without me even having to ask. They wore pronged collars to which I attached their heavy-duty canvas leashes.

Ash was still at prime learning age, while Maddie should have mastered the simple command long ago. My hunch, based on her extreme intelligence, was that she fully understood; she just didn't care to comply. Maddie was, more than any other dog I cared for, that most devilish combination of cute and headstrong.

They went on-leash by the back door. Then, we practiced heeling at the base of the stairs, again at the landing where the stairs
turned, and at the top of the flight. It didn't go well, both dogs sneezing heavily at the feathers drifting down the stairs like snow, and otherwise generally disregarding my instructions in their enthusiasm to hit the road.

At the front door, I had to be extra focused and firm with the dogs. The walkway leading up to the street was lined with cat dishes, scattered in and among the broken flower pots, a rotting bench, cobwebbed watering cans, and a dusty hose, its nozzle sitting in a dirty bowl of water left out for the cats.

I knew Maddie—and Ash, too, for that matter—would love nothing more than to clear each and every plate, tantalizingly crusted with kibble and dried Fancy Feast or some other cheap brand of wet food. Poor thing, Maddie was so desperate for anything other than boiled chicken and rice. Like a hungry girl on Weight Watchers, she had very keen radar for the presence and location of any and every morsel she was not allowed to have.

Keeping both dogs tightly reined in, one on each side of me, we made it up to street level without incident, assorted cats fleeing in our path. Dave, Maddie and Ash's former owner and current caregiver to their parents, lurked at his mailbox.

“Hey, girl!” he called. “When are you gonna come walk my dogs?” He'd been asking me this for weeks, and I hadn't yet mastered an effective deferral. I tried not to look uncomfortable.

“Pretty busy, Dave. Sorry.” I tried to soften my answer with a laugh, which came out sounding like a strangled cough.

I didn't consider myself above anyone's business; I wasn't so flush as to turn away clients. In almost every case, if they'd pay, I'd walk. Or spend the night, or give the dog or cat a bath, or take them in for their vaccinations. I was indiscriminate in my willingness to earn money helping in whatever way I could for whomever needed it.

This went somewhat against the unspoken credo within the professional sphere of animal caregivers. Based on my training at the hands of my mentors, the first (always free) meeting with a potential customer was just as much me interviewing them as the opposite. I absolutely understood why this had to be so. Entering their house often and alone to care for one or some of their most beloved companions, countless things can—and do—go wrong, even under the best circumstances. Good communication and mutual trust are absolutely essential and are a baseline requirement for a functional relationship between pet-care provider and pet owner. This was Dog Walking 101. Also, it was far preferable if you and the animal's owner were on the same page about what was best for their pet's health and happiness. And while it seems like this would always be the case with any reasonable person who loved—or even liked—their pet, such easy agreement was not always a given.

While it was obviously better to be extra discerning about my clientele, work was work, and I was having an increasingly hard time turning anything away. My business model of in-home pet-sitting and individual neighborhood walks, versus the five-dogs-at-a-time (at five times the take-home pay) group walks, was the most time-consuming and least lucrative approach in the industry. Plus, I was getting paid the reduced subcontractor rate for the majority of my appointments. Subcontracting was great because I was taking care of a client list that I didn't have to build or cultivate myself. But it meant a lot less money.

This was yet another rookie error, building such a flawed business model. The upshot was that I needed to pull a much larger income than I was. Thus, I was more willing than most to overlook some of the potentially annoying, worrying, or irresponsible aspects of a paying patron. Even considering my hyper-permissiveness when it came to high-maintenance or otherwise unappealing
clients, I could recognize that Dave took all of these yellow-flag-flying attributes to a new level. He was solidly red flag in my book.

Just last week, the German shepherd dad was savagely attacked by one of his adolescent pups, presumably in an effort to usurp the dominance of the paterfamilias. According to Susan, it did not end well for the dad. Dog fights aside, the wolf mama was constantly pregnant with a new litter, and Dave's driveway was always host to a revolving cast of cars. Whether their owners were there about dogs or drugs or something else altogether, I didn't know. And I didn't care to. The relationship between the neighbors and Dave was tense at the best of times, no one owning up to the frequent calls to animal control and the SPCA about the escapes by (and the growing number of) the wolf dogs, the conditions the dogs lived in, the constant barking and howling, and so on and so on. Every time a siren passed within ear shot (which, in this East Oakland neighborhood with its rate of crime and proximity to the freeway, was frequent enough), the family howled in concert, their collective call astonishingly loud and primal.

Susan certainly didn't adopt Ash as a matter of convenience or ease, but because she couldn't stand to watch the wolf/canine/human drama unfolding across the street without doing something, however small. Ash was like a refugee, spared the horrors of his family situation by the savior Susan. I respected the hell out of her for intervening in whatever way she could. Even if it was abundantly clear that these wolf dogs were more than she could currently manage.

That's why she hired dog walkers. It was our job to lessen her load and make the dogs' lives more comfortable. If only we could figure out how to peacefully, respectfully manage the loose cannon that was Trevor.

I exaggerated the effort it was taking me to manage Maddie and Ash in order to avoid engaging in further conversation with
Dave. Around the bend and out of his line of sight, I unclenched a bit and let the leashes out to allow the dogs a sniff and a pee. As the male in the group, Ash was naturally more inclined to mark every telephone pole, pinecone, and piece of garbage.