Dead and Doggone

  DEAD AND DOGGONE

  SUSAN CONANT

  For my mother, Dorothy Morrison Conant, and in memory of two pointers, Jock’s Great Stuff

  and Jock’s Little Nonsense, my Stuffy and my Nonny, with love from the one-pup litter.

  In acknowledging the generous help of the Committee for Responsible Research in Cambridge,

  Massachusetts, I must emphasize that the animal rights group in this book is not modeled on any

  real organization. All places and institutions in this book are fictional or used fictionally, and all characters are entirely imaginary.

  Many thanks to Jan Dale, expert groomer, and to Joel Woolfson, D.V.M., for help with this book.

  Any errors in grooming and veterinary matters are mine alone. I am also grateful for the assistance

  of one of Dr. Woolfson’s patients, my Alaskan malamute, Frostfield Arctic Natasha, C.D., my

  incarnate muse.

  -1-

  My name is Holly Winter. It could be worse. Buck and Marissa were counting on a boy. They had

  the name all picked out; Depth of Winter, to be called Dep. Any normal parents might have had

  second thoughts about sticking a kid with “of” for a middle name, but lots of Marissa’s golden

  retrievers had it — Buddy, Susie, and Ren were all “of Winterland” — and the dogs had never

  objected, so I suppose my parents, or, as they always said, my sire and dam, didn’t think a person

  would mind, either.

  It’s also possible that Marissa, who had a more advanced human social sense than Buck does,

  foresaw that the kids at school might laugh at somebody with the middle name “of.” My own name

  isn’t quite so embarrassing, but it’s bad enough. I’m sure that Marissa didn’t mean it to sound

  funny. She was a kind person. Even though I lost her eight years ago, I still miss her all the time. In

  his own way, Buck is gentle and sweet and even a bit shy, which is, I think, why he started breeding

  wolf hybrids when he got so lonely right after my mother died.

  Or maybe the only reason I escaped a worse name is that I was the third litter in a row — nine

  goldens in the first, eight in the second — and my parents had used up their current stock of stellar

  names. Or maybe they were so amazed and disappointed at having produced only a human one-

  pup litter that they didn’t bother thinking up a better name.

  That’s probably not true, though. In fact, Marissa used to claim that my father was so delighted

  with me that he tried to register me with the American Kennel Club. I think she was joking, but it is

  true that as soon as Buck adjusted to the strange way I barked, he was proud of me. He was been

  ever since. I can tell. When I got my B.A. in journalism, he started addressing my mail to Holly

  Winter, U.D., which, in case you didn’t know, is an advanced obedience title, Utility Dog, and

  Buck’s idea of a compliment.

  Even so, ever since I moved to Cambridge — and declined his offer to share the house in Maine

  with him and his wolf dogs — he’s been a little hurt. When he feels hurt, he can act petty. For

  instance, he never admits to reading Dog’s Life, but I know he subscribes, and I know he’s still sore

  at me because after every issue comes out, he finds a way to correct some tiny error in my column.

  Admittedly, he knows more about dogs than I do. He knows more about dogs than any other

  person I’ve ever met, except my mother, but what he’ll let me know he noticed is always trivial. In a

  column that came out a couple of months ago, I called a C.D., Companion Dog, a “degree.” Not a

  week after that issue came out, Buck and I just happened to have a conversation in which he used

  the phrase “obedience title” thirty or forty times with a heavy emphasis on “title.” You won’t find

  the word “degree” in the American Kennel Club Obedience Regulations, but so what?

  “That’s precisely what you could have pointed out to your father,” Rita told me. She’s my second-

  floor tenant. She also called him a master of indirect communication. Cambridge psychotherapists

  talk like that. I’ve explained to her that Buck’s indirect communication can’t be so bad because I

  always understand what he means even though someone else might not. Rita just nods and says,

  “That’s what’s wrong with it.” Even though Rita is very good to her dachshund, Groucho, she can

  sometimes be an enigmatic know-it-all when it comes to people. And Buck isn’t all that indirect.

  For instance, last Christmas, when he tied a red ribbon on one of his wolf dog pups and left it under

  the tree, where it chewed up five of its fellow presents, it just meant that he hated to think of his

  thirty-year-old daughter living alone in the city with only one dog. That’s what I was more or less

  down to at the moment.

  More or less? As I told Buck, if the average Alaskan malamute equaled five or ten other dogs in

  strength, IQ, and looks, Rowdy equaled at least two or three other malamutes. To me, I added, he

  was worth the endowment of my neighborhood school, a place called Harvard, and when it came to

  brains, he was better endowed than most of the faculty. So I needed a big dog? Mine weighed

  eighty-five pounds of muscle, I reminded my father. And beautiful? His coat shone silvery gray and

  white, and I like his face, an open face, no dark marking on his muzzle and no black mask around

  his eyes, which, as I reminded Buck, were that very dark brown eyes that’s so desirable in

  malamutes. If he has blue eyes, turn them brown. Shape them like almonds round the tips of his

  ears and set them wide apart on his head. Give him an even plumier white tail, an even pinker

  tongue, and an even bigger smile than he needs, and he’ll look like Rowdy, not, incidentally, his real

  name, which I didn’t pick. I didn’t pick the name Rowdy, either, even though it suited him. By the

  time I got him, he responded to it, but that’s another story.

  This one started with a dog fight that broke out on Walden Street in front of Quigley Drugs, only

  a few blocks from my house, which is the red one at the corner of Appleton and Concord. I’d walked

  rowdy past Quigley Drugs before, and the place had always worried me. It looked like a regular

  house, but you could tell it was a drugstore because over the front door hung a tilted sign positioned

  to crash on any customer who opened or closed the door. Since the sign had hung like that for

  years, I’d always assumed that no one had ever gone in or out.

  Even before the day of the fight, I knew from the barks that erupted whenever I walked Rowdy by

  the store that there were dogs at Quigley Drugs, but I hadn’t realized that they were in fact the

  magnificent pointers who showed up at dog training with their rather odd owners once every few

  months. I should have guessed. The Cambridge Dog Training Club meets at the armory on Concord

  Avenue, and I’d noticed that the pointers and their handlers walked home after class. The

  connection came to me as soon as I saw the woman standing in front of the store, on the cracked,

  weedy blacktop where you’d expect a front lawn to be.

  The lights at the armory turn everyone a greenish purple, but spring sunlight didn’t flatter her,

  either. She was a scrawny little thing somewhere between forty
and seventy, cracked and weedy like

  the blacktop, with great folds of Shar Pei wrinkles dripping from the bones of her arms. When we

  got nearer to her, I could see what looked like a mask was at least a quarter inch of suntan-colored

  foundation makeup. The fuchsia ringlets on her head must have been a wig. She wore an oversize

  pink baby dress and a pair of open-toed sling-back high heels that matched the dress and clashed

  with the hair. A cork-tipped cigarette dangled form her lips, and coral lipstick filled the cracks

  around them.

  “Come, Max!” she was screeching. “Come to Mama! Here, Max!”

  If she’d shown up at dog training every week, she’d have learned to say his name first, then the

  command: Max, come. It didn’t seem to matter to Rowdy, however; he was fascinated. When he

  dragged me to within a few yards of her and was about to introduce himself, across Walden Street

  bounded the errant Max, a lithe black and white pointer with a good head and a long, fluid stride.

  Rowdy must have outweighed Max by thirty pounds, and my malamute’s double coat of thick fur

  made him look even burlier than he was, but, in spite of his heft, he was no bully. Until the pointer

  tore into him, Rowdy probably assumed he was in for nothing more than some harmless rough-

  and-tumble or a ritual exchange of growls. As it was, the fight broke out, as some do, with none of

  the customary preliminaries, no long moments of raised hackles, no questioning snarls, none of the

  circling around that gives each dog time to assess the other’s true intentions. Once second, Max was

  streaking toward us. The next second, Rowdy had torn the leash from my hands, and the two dogs

  had hurled themselves into a snarling mass of slashing teeth and writhing fur. It sounded as vicious

  as it looked, an inhuman exchange of high-pitched yelps of pain, rumbling battle cries, and throaty

  canine obscenities.

  Within seconds, Rowdy was on top, but Max’s neck was twisting sharply around to position his

  teeth close to my big dog’s soft, vulnerable throat. Rowdy had two moves open. If he kept Max

  pinned, eh could dig his oversize canines into the back of Max’s throat. But if, as looked likely, Max

  managed to wriggle out from under, Rowdy could barrel into him, open those great malamute jaws,

  and crush the pointer’s pretty muzzle.

  The sudden, brawly shock of a dog fight, the primitive wailing, the guttural intimidations, the

  unpredictable lunges and slashes that can kill your dog or brand him a killer — all of it impels

  people to add human yells to the noisy chaos. We did. It takes a lot of self-discipline and more than

  a few old scars not to stomp into the fracas and try to snatch the first collar your hand meets. The

  lesson I’ve learned is that you always, always get bitten. If you have to grab, go for a tail, but be sure

  someone else goes for the other one at the same time. Better yet, run for a bucket of water or a

  streaming hose.

  No more than twenty hour-long seconds after the fight started, I spotted the sprinkler irrigating

  the patchy lawn and scrubby privet in front of the triple-decker beyond the drugstore. I vaulted

  over the hedge, got a good grip on the sprinkler, cleared the hedge again, and brought the fight to a

  drenched end.

  We made a ludicrous foursome there on the blacktop, two dogs indignantly shaking off water,

  two women gripping collars and ducking to avoid the spray. I tossed the sprinkler back over the

  hedge and checked Rowdy out. He’d always hated water, especially on his underbelly, and he’d

  taken plenty, but he’d shaken it off quickly and, with it, the disappointment of having had the most

  thrilling moments of the past year so quickly and liquidly interrupted. His big red-pink tongue was

  hanging out in a joyful, lopsided grin. His damp white tail was sailing merrily back and forth. He’d

  already forgiven me for spoiling the fun.

  “I can’t find any damage,” I said. “How about you?”

  she didn’t answer me. She was too busy talking to Max, who was straining at his collar in eager

  anticipation of Round Two. “Mama is going to put you right back where you belong,” she cooed.

  She dragged the protesting pointer past the beat-up green station wagon in the driveway and

  around the side of the store, then reappeared. Fat globules of makeup were rolling down her

  cheeks. I was afraid her whole face was going to dissolve and slide off, and I wasn’t eager to look at

  whatever lay underneath.

  “it takes a gutsy pointer to go after a malamute,” I said. I meant it, but in the human negotiation

  ritual that follows a dog fight, I’d made a clumsy move. According to unwritten rules, each person

  expresses concern for the other person’s dog. Eventually, if all goes well, the people then find some

  way to agree that both dogs are to blame, even though each person remains convinced that the

  other’s dog started it.

  “ ‘Go after’!” she yelled at me. “Max didn’t start that.”

  Rowdy, of course, really hadn’t started it. He’d never started a fight. He’d never back down,

  either. He expected the same of me. I wasn’t about to let him watch me knuckle under.

  “Max obviously started it,” I said. “The minute Max saw him, he could hardly wait to tear into

  him. You’re lucky Max is still alive.” That’s true. When Alaskan malamutes fight, they go for a kill.

  That’s why it’s dangerous to train them as guard dogs. I didn’t tell her that.

  “If I find one scratch on Max,” she screamed, “I’m suing you. That’s a damned bloodthirsty wolf is

  what that is.”

  My bloodthirsty wolf was sitting at heel and, for once, looking up to read my face.

  “This is an obedience-trained Alaskan malamute.” I spoke slowly and quietly. “Cambridge has a

  leash law, and he was on leash. Max was running loose.”

  It was below the belt. Any dog escapes once in a while. I’d never once seen Max running loose in

  the neighborhood. Even so, I tried to sound calm and self-confident, and I tried to defuse things.

  “Look, dogs will fight. I don’t think Max is hurt. Let’s check him out.”

  We did. One of these days, I’m going to be able to put Rowdy on a long down — that is, order him

  to lie and stay put — leave, and know that when I return, he won’t have budged an inch. As it was, I

  downed him, tied his leash to a peeling drain pipe at one corner of Quigley Drugs, and followed the

  bizarre little woman through the gate of the rusty chain link fence into a backyard landscaped by

  dogs and lush with emerging city weeds.

  A true dog lover is someone who never remembers your name and never forgets your dog’s. at

  some time, I’d probably been told the name of the woman I assumed to be Mrs. Quigley, but the

  lovely pointer bitch who shared Max’s yard was, I remembered, Lady. Like Max, she was white with

  black spots over the body and a few black patches on the back. Both pointers barked a little as they

  ran up to us. Pointers, I should say, are not mean-tempered. True, they won’t cover a stranger with

  wet kisses the way malamutes will. But most pointers are sweet, friendly dogs with an aristocratic

  dignity that Lady lacked. Max had that regal bearing, but the little bitch was pathetically love

  hungry. While I made the kind of fuss over her that she deserved, the woman tried her damnedest

  to find something wrong with Max, but there wasn’t a mark on him, thank God
, not a bleeding ear,

  not a single puncture.

  “Look, I’m really sorry this happened,” I said. “I’m sure Max just didn’t like another dog on his

  turf. He’s gorgeous. They both are.”

  She lit a cigarette.

  “Number three in the Northeast last year,” she said. At least she spoke my language. I assumed

  she meant Max, who had a winner’s arrogance. “And entered on Sunday. A torn ear would’ve blown

  that.”

  “I’ll watch for him,” I smiled. “We’ll be there.”

  “Sissy,” she said, sticking on e Dragon Lady claw toward me.

  For a second, I thought she meant me, but I caught my mistake.

  “Holly,” I said as I took the claw. “I’ve seen you at dog training.” I’m not one of those people who

  like to have canaries and parakeets perch on their hands. Sissy’s fingers felt like fleshless bird feet.

  “I feel terrible about this. I love pointers. I’ve always admired your dogs.”

  That did it. Wet and cold, I had to stand there and listen to a catalog of Max’s wins, an impressive

  list, then a discourse on Sissy’s hopes for Lady, then a history of complaints about cow-hocked,

  pigeon-breasted pointers places ahead of hers by fools of judges. I thought the adenoidal whine

  would never stop.

  I finally managed to edge my way toward the gate. “I’m a little chilled,” I said. “I think I’d better

  get home and dry off.” I sneezed.

  “Allergies?” She looked delighted.

  “Just chilled, I think.”

  “Myself, I suffer something terrible from allergies. Pollen. Hay fever. Bees. Bees is my worst.”

  “Not dogs, I hope?” I asked jokingly.

  “Dogs. Cats. Name it, and I’m allergic to it.” She sounded as proud of her allergies as she’d

  sounded of Max’s wins. “My allergist says I’m a fool. Last time I see him, he goes, ‘You’re a martyr to your dogs. Get rid of them dogs, and you’ll breathe a free woman.’ ‘Get rid of my dogs?’ I go. ‘Not

  on your life. My husband or my kid, but not my dogs. Just give me a shot for it,’ I go, ‘because I’ve

  got a big show coming up, and no doctor’s making me pull my Max.’ “

  My mother didn’t believe in allergies. “Allergic to dogs?” Marissa would say. “Hah! Allergic to

  life.” Buck, in contrast, doesn’t doubt the existence of a true allergic response to dogs any more than