Bad Dog (10 page)

Hola stands.

“Not bad,” says Wendy, her eyes widening. “Now watch how she gets this wrong. Hola, down.”

Hola goes down.

Moment of silence. Even Atticus appears amazed.

At the end of class, Wendy goes from pair to pair delivering advice on what to do next. When she gets to Hola and me, her expression is surprisingly soft.

“How do you feel?” she asks me.

“Really good,” I lie. “I think we made some great progress.”

“Okay. What are your goals?”

“Just—I want to work on her manners.”

“Great idea.”

It feels strangely like that time I sat down with my junior-year girlfriend, Megan, at Sbarro in Herald Square and we both knew it would be our last family-style meat lover’s pizza together. Ever.

Wendy is being pretty conspicuous about not recommending our next class, so I decide I’ll jump into the canyon: “I was thinking maybe we could try the Canine Good—”

“Here’s the thing,” she says, lowering her voice. “I have some advice for you. Is that okay?”

“Hit me.”

“Dogs are very sensitive, you know.”

“And how.”

“What you have there is an especially sensitive girl. She’s got a set of radar on her that’s unusual.”

What?

“She’s really tuned in to you.”

I start to laugh until I realize this isn’t 1980s-style irony. “What?”

“Try not to be so nervous in here, you know? Just be calm and have some fun.”

“Come again?”

“What I’m saying,” she says, “is you’re freaking her out. Look at her today—she knows all the commands. That’s not the problem. She’s hysterical because you are. Think about it.”

Stunned silence. Not from Hola, of course, who chooses to prove Wendy right by whining at her retreating, mom-jeaned caboose. Not only has Wendy nailed me, so to speak, but she’s said something profoundly depressing.

It would be much easier to train Hola to jump through a flaming tire than it would be to teach myself to calm down. Anxiety is what keeps me alive. Me not all worried and nervous is me without the
e
or the
m
.

T
HE RIDE BACK
to Manhattan is not our best ever. I am surprised how explosively hurt, bewildered, tricked, betrayed, and other adjectives I feel inside. True to her role as my own personal radar detector, Hola sits on the fitted sheet I use to protect the backseat, staring at my head and whimpering. It doesn’t help.

Tuned into you
.

Be calm
.

Have F-U-N
.

It is like all those walks with the meats and the stays were a waste of time, like I’d been treating the disease with bloodletting when what it really needed was a sweet dose of something that was no longer in stock.

Clark once said to me: “Marty, you’ve got more of a theory than a life.”

“What does that mean?”

“Read the Big Book. There’s a chapter in there called ‘Into Action.’ There’s no chapter called ‘Into Thinking.’ ”

Sometimes I felt like all he’d read were the chapter titles and the slogans they had up on the walls in the rooms—Let Go and Let God, Easy Does It But Do It, It’s Alcohol-ism Not Alcohol-wasm—but, hey, it worked for him.

Hola knows Daddy is mad at her, and she seems to have less fire in her eyes as we mount the stairs to go home. Training has an effect like hard physical exercise on dogs. Mental effort takes a bite out of them, and she is always exhausted after class.

Still, she isn’t making eye contact, and her gay tail trails limply on the tiles.

I crack open the phone to dial Gloria, and then I change my mind. I don’t want my first call to her to be just me complaining about Hola, of all things. Relationships should be about good news.

I don’t call her. Which is just my way of putting the ball in her court. I’m sitting at home reading a dog mystery out loud to Hola, who is asleep, and I’m listening for the phone to ring. Then I realize I am being ridiculous and immature and turn the phone off. But then I think she might call me but not leave a message and I’d never know it, so I turn the phone back on. I put it on the table by my bed all night so Hola and I can hear it if it makes a sound.

Life without Gloria
.

T
WENTY-FIVE YEARS EARLIER:

You couldn’t believe a word my mother said, including
dog
and
cat
.

She was an extraordinarily attractive female, like Hola; quite short, with sharp, symmetrical features and large aqua eyes that didn’t rest anywhere for long. Like many beautiful people, she was tormented by the failure of a youthful acting career.

Half measures availed us nothing
, says the Big Book.
We stood at the turning point
.

She’d grown up poor in Glasgow, Scotland, and her father was a light-boned, red-albino Irishman with milk-white hair since his twenties and wax-paper skin, a butcher when he did work. Missing most of the forefinger on his left hand. Three guesses. Don’t show up to work drunk, especially if you work with a meat cleaver.

Our troubles, we think, are basically of our own making
.

“I was draggin’ me pa home from the pub,” said my mother, “and a big dog attacked me. Just came out of nowhere and started snackin’ on me wee body like I was a bit of shortbread.”

My sister, Cherie, gasped audibly while my brother and I went back to our Mad Lib.

“Oh, my God,” said Cherie. “What happened?”

“Not that your brothers would care,” said my mother, surveying us with her usual profound disappointment.

“Adjective,” I said to my brother, Peter.

“Yellow-bellied.”

“A real adjective.”

“I was in the hospital for a month,” sniffed my mother. “Maybe six.”

My sister looked puzzled. “I thought you said you didn’t have hospitals when you were a girl. They were only for the rich people and the rotten British bastards.”

“Language,” said my mother. She always despised the British, or claimed to, though she was vague on exactly why. “We had hospitals. It’s just we didn’t have any medical supplies. Or any doctors.”

“Because of the British?”

“In part,” she said, tapering her voice now to let the string section swell up on the soundtrack. “Also because we were very poor. And poor people—”

“Are treated like shite!”
we all said as a chorus.

“Adverb,” I added.

My brother said, “Painfully.”

The dog story changed—sometimes she was just nipped on the leg and limped home; sometimes she had to have a blood transfusion and the Rite of Extreme Unction from Father McManus—but the message was always the same:

Dogs are bad. Like the British.

Which is why I was puzzled when a dog appeared one day, hopping out of my dad’s gunmetal blue Citroën SM, bounding up to my sister and literally knocking her off the back of her Big Wheel. He was a white standard poodle, obviously no longer a puppy but too zippy to be all that old. Maybe he was one or two.

“This is Sammy,” said my father, who in those days was a rather dashing Dr. Kildare type with brown leathery skin and a thoroughbred or two on the side. The dog’s only obvious fault, from our point of view, was that he didn’t particularly like small animals. “He’s a good boy.”

Whether Sammy was good or not it was too soon to tell, but he certainly seemed to have a lust for life. He was happily humping my dad’s right leg, and he didn’t appear to be fixed.

This was when we’d just moved to Michigan, out of South Africa via Queens, New York, and my dad was in the second of a lifetime of mysterious American jobs, this one at a teaching hospital at Wayne State University in downtown Detroit. He was a medical man, and all I knew was that he did research.

“Wow,” said my brother. “What kind of dog is that?”

“A big one,” I said. Mr. Encyclopedia.

From the start I had a bad feeling about this Sammy situation. For one thing, he never left the house. My mom distrusted and feared him, of course, but on a more practical level she didn’t have a clue what to do with a dog. She seemed to think they were just particularly annoying cats.

That which you fear the most will meet you halfway.

“Shouldn’t we walk him outside?” asked my brother, the smartest of the three kids.

“Why?” asked my mother.

“ ’Cause that’s what Mr. Kelly does with Beth’s dog every day. Two times.”

“Mr. Kelly is a very ignorant man.”

What my mother had done was put newspaper down in a corner of the laundry room and encourage Sammy to use it for his show tunes. Amazingly, he preferred other places, including my dad’s big leather chair in the living room. That the chair was
also brown led to some unfortunate incidents late at night, when my dad settled in to read Gibbon’s
The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
after his shift at the lab.

“Christmas!”
he’d scream. To his credit, although my father swore loudly and often, he never used regular curse words.

I turned to Sammy, who was also awake and who for some reason had decided to sleep up on my bed with me.

“You’ve got to stop doing that,” I whispered. “He’s going to take you to the pound.”

I’m sorry
, he seemed to say.
I don’t know what I’m supposed to do
.

“You and me both, boy. You and me both.”

M
Y SISTER TRIED
to play with Sammy after school while my brother did his advanced math problems and I surveyed the scene ironically.

“What are you doing?” I asked her.

“I’m teaching him a trick.”

“What kind of trick?”

“As a matter of fact, I’m teaching him mime.”

“That’s ridiculous.”

“You only think that ’cause you’re retarded.”

“You’re retarded.”

“You don’t know anything about dogs.”

She was right, of course, but I knew she would totally fail. This was a dog who didn’t know a single command—whose
owners
didn’t know a single command—and who lived on cuff links and the bowls of Cap’n Crunch I fed him. The only exercise he got was when he dry-humped the floor-model Electrolux.

Peter was the one who noticed the change. It was subtle,
the first time. Something not quite describable but nonetheless there. More on the inside than the outside. One day Sammy was different.

For one thing, he seemed a little smaller. For another, he was scared; twitched every time a car passed. He looked haggard and haunted—like a dog on the run from the law.

“What’s wrong with Sammy?” asked Peter. “He’s not chewing on my lift tickets. And look—he did it on the newspaper like he’s supposed to. He lost his spirit.”

Suddenly, my mom got very busy arranging our after-school chocolate cupcakes on a plate. I should have been suspicious: they were the enormous Superman-themed cakes from Machus Bakery.

“Sammy’s sick,” I said that night at dinner. “He doesn’t like Cap’n Crunch.”

“Absurd,” said my mom. “Everybody likes the Cap’n.”

“Not Sammy. Not anymore.”

Eventually, we found something he liked—Cheez Doodles—and my sister got him to do a pretty good sit by pushing down on his haunches. The fact that any dog sits when you do that didn’t detract from her sense of triumph.

“Look!” she screamed. “Sammy’s sitting! Look! You’re not looking.”

A few days later, the dog had changed again. He still had the haunted, witness-protection look, the hollow eyes, the droopy whiskers that told of bad decisions that had crossed state lines. But there was something else, too.

As usual, my brother noticed it first.

“Hey, what happened to Sammy?” he asked. “He’s a different color. He’s, like, blue or something.”

“That’s ridiculous,” said my mom.

“What, did he roll around in something?” Peter ran his right
hand over Sammy’s curly pelt and then examined it. “Nope. No residue. He’s clean.”

My brother always spoke like he worked for the Justice Department. He wasn’t even a citizen.

“Why is he growling?” asked my sister.

“Oh, Jesus, not again. Stop growling!” my mom snapped at me.

“Not Martin, the dog. Sammy’s growling.”

“It’s probably hunger pangs,” I said, optimistically searching our cabinets for some King Vitaman.

“Maybe he doesn’t like being blue,” said my brother.

My mom swung around with a kind of desperate, half-cocked look in her eye that made us focus on our snack cakes. “Could you children please be quiet?! I can’t hear myself cook here.”

“There’s no doubt about it,” I said after a moment. “Sammy is a different color.”

“He’s blue,” said my brother.

“You know what I think,” said my sister, who tended to say the things others feared to say, usually when her mouth was full. “I think that isn’t Sammy.”

We were in the living room teaching Sammy backgammon one day when my dad came home and said he had some news for us.

No news was good news in that family. We tended not to make flat-out statements of fact unless the cops were in the driveway.

“I’m afraid I made a mistake,” said my dad. “I … you see, I … I promised Sammy to another family, another little girl, and I have to give him back. But she’s very thankful you took such good, uh, care of him. But I have to give him back.”