Bad Dog (22 page)

The ref watches us carefully, and I can see the other handlers, our friends from the classes, start to lean forward, probably thinking,
What a silly exercise to fail
. If you’re gonna go down in the CGC, don’t do it on the down. It’s too common.

Faith descends in that moment. Hola’s too strong to let her dark side—which I am beginning to think of as the Bad Dog—win on a walk. I will her to listen to my heart racing hard in her direction.

“Hola,” I whisper. “With me, now.” I breathe, matching her breath; the ringside recedes, the ref dissolves into the mat.

“Hola baby,” I say, “do it for Mommy now. Down.”

She goes down.

“Okay,” says the ref. “Ask your dog to stay.”

“Hola, stay!” with the hand signal: flat palm, fingers down, two inches in front of her nose.

“Turn around and go back ten steps. Okay. Now go back to your dog.”

I’m not afraid of Hola’s stay: even on her worst days, when she had pounded herself with a hailstorm of doubt, her stay was pretty solid.

“Now leave her in a sit or a down, whichever you prefer, and go back five steps. Turn around. Okay.” A quiet moment: my favorite in the test. What’s coming is incredible. “Now ask your dog to come.”

Spreading my arms and leaning back, I say, “Hola, come!”

Her recalls are always comical: she explodes out of her stay, running toward me with such thunderous enthusiasm, often banging into me at the end with so much gusto I fall over. It’s not the most nuanced recall in the world.

But, hey, I think, as I’m snapping on her leash after recovering my balance, she just passed items #6 and #7, “Sit and down on command” and “Coming when called.”

Just so does the enemy soften us with complacency; the Bad Dog is a master of the distance game.

Looking back, I should have anticipated that our opponent would again hunt down a weakness where we didn’t think we had one. Because the next item, #8, “Reaction to another dog,” was not one we’d worried about.

In it, the handler and the ref both have a dog they ask to sit while they shake hands and go on their way; throughout the exercise, there are two humans standing between the dogs, who are not supposed to rush over to one another, bark, play-bow, or otherwise act like normal dogs.

Hola had been knocking it out of the park during training, sitting like a little Buddha to my left as I shook hands with my classmates and we moved along.

The ref, who had stepped out of the ring for a moment,
returns leading her shi tzu, Molly, who looks like ten pounds of trouble to me: she has a big pink bow all but buried in her salon-shiny white fur, and, worse, she is just the kind of pint-sized pretty girl Hola adores.

Placing Molly gently on the ground to her left, the ref says, “Okay, now let’s walk past each other once.”

As Hola and I go past them, I can see the fire-red eyes of the Bad Dog gleaming out of Hola’s as she gets a whiff of this dog she’s never seen before. Too late, I realize that Hola isn’t really able to sit quietly until she’s familiar with a dog: first time out, she always jumps on them.

We about-turn and the ref says, “Come up to me and have your dog sit. Then I’ll shake your hand. Ready?”

Nope, nada, niente
, I’m thinking as I nod.

“Let’s go.”

In a moment, we’re side by side and I ask Hola to sit. She does. I turn to the ref and—

There’s a rifle shot of black fur screaming past me below, and I see the ref lose her balance, catching herself with a shuffle, and Hola squeaks left-right-left with electrifying speed, driving her nose into the shi tzu’s face and stick-pinning her with a paw half-nelson … It all happens so fast, between beats of my heart, I am not even conscious of stepping back and pulling Hola into a heel at my side, saying, “
Hola, back! Stop! Heel! No!
”—nearly every one-syllable dog word I know.

After I reel Hola in, the ref smiles sympathetically and says, “Let’s try that one again. She was a little nervous.”

It’s a well-kept secret, but the AKC’s guidelines allow the evaluator to let a dog try a single item again if she fails. So our ref is by the book as she lets us do another about-turn and come back toward her. What she can’t do is convince me we have a chance here.

Hola has failed.

There is no scenario I can envision where she succeeds in sticking her sit with that new best friend she doesn’t know just inches away from her nose—not one.

Deep in myself, I feel a tragic melancholy rise, like a man who’s walked all the way across America to find California in ruins.

But Hola, as usual, isn’t listening to me.

Standing farther away from the ref and her shi tzu this time, I say, “Hola, sit.”

I’m looking into her eyes now, both of them, saying over and over, “Hola, sit, good, sit, stay, good,” a mishmash of calmly spoken commands that don’t convey much except stay where you are and just ignore my hand gliding out, groping the air for the ref’s hand, making contact, waiting for her release to go on, and as she says, “Okay,” I move briskly forward off my left leg, getting Hola as far as possible from the shi tzu as quickly as I can.

She cranes her neck around, a wistful final glance, and I let my shoulders drop and look down at my hands: I’m holding the leash so tightly that my knuckles are white.

T
HE REF POINTS
to a woman in a blue blazer sitting in a brown metal folding chair by the fire extinguisher.

“We’re going to have you go out of sight for three minutes,” she says. “Give Meryl here your leash and go through the doors over there. I’ll call you back when—”

“What about number nine,” I say. “The distractions.”

“We did it already,” says the ref.

“What?”

Item #9, “Reaction to distraction,” requires the dog to remain calm during distractions such as dropped crutches, joggers, wheelchairs, whatever.

“During the walk through the crowd,” she says, “didn’t you hear it? We dropped a lot of stuff.”

“Oh.”

I hadn’t noticed anything—our focus was just that intense. As directed, I ask the woman in the blazer, “Will you hold my dog, please?”

“Yes, of course.”

“I’ll be right back.”

“Let me guess, in three minutes?”

Everyone’s a comedian.

Here we are already: item #10—our bête noire, our Waterloo: “Supervised separation.”

As I’m leaving the ring, going out through the swinging doors into the vestibule that leads to the parking lot, I stand up against the wall and pray not to hear Hola whining, crying, yelping, screeching, yowling, or doing any of the things she’s not supposed to do.

It occurs to me this is the most spiritual of all the CGC test items. There is nothing I can do now. Hola passes the test or she doesn’t.

I just have to let go of her, think happy thoughts, wish her a protective paw against the attractions of her former self, rely on all the training we have done.

I need to have a little faith.

A
FTER
H
OLA PASSES HER
CGC
TEST
, I immediately send a note to Susan Conant. She has become a pen pal during this process, and I attach a picture I’d taken with my cell phone of some of her books I’d seen stacked on a table near the Port Chester entrance before we took the test. “It seemed to me like a good omen,” I tell her.

She replies immediately: “Oh, Marty, I am so proud of you and Hola! I like to imagine that the copies of my books contributed to the ambience that helped Hola to be such a good girl.”

And I call my sister; and my friend Clark, who’s still in rehab; and my new sponsor, Darryl, who isn’t. And I write a note to Mary Burch, showing off, which is strongly encouraged in the dog world.

And then I call Gloria. She doesn’t answer. I leave a message. Then I saddle up Hola and take her out into the blizzard to celebrate.

There is nothing Hola likes more than snow. It’s the environment where she makes the most sense. I like to think that on a genetic level it’s like one of us humans going back to the town we grew up in; suddenly, we are home. We can relax.

So she’s bounding through the drifts piling up in front of
our building, doing backflips as though trying to spring off the wind, and I almost don’t feel my phone vibrating in my pocket.

It’s Gloria.

“Hey,” I say, breathing hard into the phone. “You’ll never guess—”

“She passed?”

“Yup, she passed. Didn’t whine at all in number ten. Had some problems with the, you know, ignoring the other dog one, but she made it up. It was amazing. It’s like she knew how important it was.”

“Wow.”

“You’re surprised?”

“Amazed,” she says. “I wanted to go but the snow—it was too dangerous. You guys worked so hard. Probably no one worked harder for a CGC than you did. Maybe ever.”

“Probably.”

“Where are you? Outside?”

“Yeah. Hola’s making snow angels. They look like … uh, kind of like her.”

Wind tears down the street, slamming into the snow, and I turn my back toward it.

“Oh, my God,” I say, “this is quite a freaking storm.”

“I know,” Gloria says. “I can see you.”

“What’s it like in—what? What did you say?”

“I can see you. Turn around.”

Just then, Hola decides to use her daddy as a pivot around which to test the maximum centrifugal energy generation possible by a Bernese mountain dog, and she rockets around me, twisting me up in the leash just as I’m trying to turn.

I stagger back and, feet clamped in the leash, tumble into the snow.

Hola stands over me, panting, and I swear I can see her trying not to laugh.

“Ha, ha,” I say to her. “Ha, ha, ha.”

You’re welcome
, she says.

So I’m sitting up, wiping off my glasses and digging for my phone in the snow when I see a familiar pair of L. L. Bean duck boots and then a familiar red coat and hat, and Gloria reaches her hand down and tries to pull me up.

Except I’m heavier than she is, and the ground is soft and icy, and she falls down on top of me, and we’re lying there in the snow together trying to catch our breath.

Which gets harder when Hola decides to jump on top of both of us for a Bernese family reunion.

A
WEEK LATER
, a Saturday morning after some of the snow has melted, I’m sitting on the bed with my coffee and the animals, trying to explain to Gloria why Ruby the cat likes me.

“It’s because I accept her as she is,” I say. “I don’t judge her like you do.”

“I don’t judge Ruby,” Gloria says.

“Do you think she’s fat?”

“Yes.”

“Do you think she’s cranky?”

“Yes.”

“What about her personality? How would you characterize that?”

“Bad.”

“Are these positive qualities you just said?”

“Not really.”

“So you’re judging Ruby.”

“Yes,” she admits, “but she’s too stupid to know that.”

“Shhh,” I say, “she’s right there. She can hear you.”

Ruby scampers into the back room, where Gloria keeps her upright piano and her library of cookbooks and American standards of the songwriting art, and in a few seconds we hear three clear notes from the keyboard. The rhythm is off, but it sounds to me a lot like a song I recognize.

“You hear that?” I ask Gloria.

“Kitten on the Keys?”

“No,” I say. “It sounded like the first three notes of that Pat Benatar song.”

“You’re crazy.”

“ ‘Love Is a Battlefield.’ ”

At that moment, there’s a knock on the door, and it turns out to be Jesus the doorman with a package for me. It’s from Mary Burch, head of the Canine Good Citizen program: a signed copy of her new book
Citizen Canine
, the first AKC-sanctioned training guide for the CGC. Her note thanks me for my commitment to the test—which is, as you know, almost epic.

There’s also a bond-weight envelope embossed with a gold AKC seal marked
“For Hola.”
Inside is a card congratulating her on her certification and an Olympic-size gold medal with a festive yellow-and-blue neck ribbon.

Respectfully, I hang it around Hola’s neck.

She stands there, bewildered, as she usually does when odd things like hats and sweaters are forced onto her head by ridiculous people. Her usual reaction is to shrug it off within seconds, then check for yumminess. But not this time.

Shock turns to a kind of quiet pride as she sits confidently, beaming, as though waiting for the press conference to start.