Read Bad Dog Online

Authors: Martin Kihn

Bad Dog (3 page)

“That’s Bella,” said Florence. “He’s the sire. I flew him in from Switzerland.”

“What does he weigh?” I asked.

“Oh, hardly anything. One twenty or so. He’s lost weight. What a doll. These others are bitches. They’re all mine.”

As I was contemplating how casually dog people throw around that word
bitch
, one of the creatures collapsed next to Bella and lay there, barely blinking. She was the single tiredest-looking thing with a pulse I’d ever seen in my life.

“Is she sick?” Gloria asked.

“That’s the mother. She’s exhausted. There’s six in the litter.”

Moment of silence. The Miracle of Birth. Zzzz.

Bernese mountain dogs are gorgeous animals, as you know, and a big part of that sex appeal comes from their tricolored coat. The fur on Bella’s chest and underside was downy and snow white, like the tip of his tail and the blaze on his muzzle. The rest of his thick fur was shiny jet black, with some patches
of rust on his cheeks and forelegs. Bernese people think they see on their dogs’ chests an inverted Swiss cross, but like the Shroud of Turin it’s visible only to believers.

Bella certainly seemed friendly enough. Our strengths are our weaknesses. Bernese err by going overboard.

In retrospect I see that breeder played me like a game of fetch.

We were filling out all the forms that said basically this dog is incredibly special and deserves first-class treatment, and by the way, it’s so deeply flawed it must never be allowed to breed. We also said we’d never give the dog away, get it a haircut, feed it Alpo or Mighty Dog or just about anything else, let it skip puppy class or take mind-altering drugs, become a Jehovah’s Witness or join the Screen Actors Guild. You only think I’m exaggerating.

Secretly, I kept looking for the xeroxed sheet that said,
P.S. I’m joking, and so is your wife. Ha!

Although momentarily distracted from my mission by Bella, I can admit to you now I’d decided these forms were not enforceable in human courts and was formulating my speech to Gloria on the way back to the city—
You know, dear, it’s not you or the dog; it’s me, but …
—when Florence unleashed the shock and awe of the unscrupulous breeder. Casually, she said:

“Oh, do you want to see the puppies?”

“No,” I said.

She led us into the back room, where there was a kind of corral made of busted cardboard boxes and newspaper and a big bowl of water. And six little five-week-old cute-attacks waiting to happen.

If you haven’t seen a baby Bernese mountain dog, spare yourself. They have a way of separating a fool from his senses.

“Do you want to hold one?” Florence asked me.

“No.”

She picked up a particularly roly-poly, docile example of the breed and instructed me to cradle him in my left hand close to my body and run my other hand down his little fuzzy body. He all but purred.

“Cute, huh.”

It wasn’t a question.

Out of the corner of my eye, down in the puppy corral, I noticed one of the litter careening around like a nutcase, kicking newspaper out of the way, trying to chew a hole in the back wall, and doing a Mexican hat dance with her hind legs.

Gosh
, I remember thinking,
what’s wrong with that one?

What’s wrong was that three weeks later, when we drove back to Rochester, that was the one we took home.

My Scottish mother experienced the Miracle of Birth three times and claims she could tell right from the beginning what we would be like when we were older.

“Your brother was a wonderful baby,” she told me many times. “Very calm and in control. I knew he’d be special.” Gag.

“Your sister was a fighter, right away. She scrambled for everything. She’s still quite, uh, insistent on her point of view.”

“What about me?” I asked her, begging for a beating.

“Well,” she said, looking plaintive and misty, like one of her favorite sheep had choked on some haggis. “I won’t lie,” she lied. “You were a difficult child. Always sensitive and moody. It was hard to keep you interested. I think you had that ADD. And you decided you didn’t need your mother. It was like you didn’t trust me to take care of you.”

Most breeders claim that a dog has a basic personality from the start, called a temperament, and they try to match it with the prospective owner. Want a dog to do work on the farm? A
serious disposition with good focus, high drive—check. Want a dog to bring you the remote and lie in your lap during
Nick at Nite
? Placid, not too smart, unambitious—check. Want a dog you can bring to nursing homes as a therapy dog? Smart, submissive, not easily startled—check.

Want a dog that is naturally dominant, feels no pain, is as outgoing as Ethel Merman on Jolt and is orally fixated? Say
hola
to Hola. The dog for the couple so ignorant they didn’t even know to ask for the results of the puppy temperament test. Good breeders do this test at around seven weeks, and it involves a few simple probes, like putting the puppy on her back, making a sharp noise, setting her down, and walking away—tests for dominance (bad), sensitivity (good), and friendliness (super).

Florence did the test on Hola. I saw the sheets of paper in her hand. For some strange reason, she was reluctant to let us get a look at them.

“She’ll make a great therapy dog,” she said. “She’s got a great temperament.”

Unless that woman was practicing her stand-up comedy act, she is going to Hell.

But no matter. I’m grateful for our lack of knowledge, in a way. The other buyers were obviously more savvy than we were—they didn’t get Hola, after all—but if we’d known better, we wouldn’t have taken her. We’d have seen the red flags. Then where would she go?

The ride back to the city was complicated by the fact that Rochester was frosted by ice from a massive storm that had left its suburbs dark at noon. Florence had a generator, or we wouldn’t have been able to see the puppies. It took eight hours to get home, and Hola squirmed and cried in my lap in the passenger’s seat until I stumbled on a strange way to shut her up.

The trouble begins
.

Three words: Christian contemporary radio.

Put her out like a Christmas light.

“I know this seems like a mistake,” I said to Gloria as we skirted around Ithaca. “But I want you to know, I feel in my heart this was a good idea.”

I’m not sure what made me so sure, so sincere. It was out of character. But I meant it. Hola was peaceful now, the Christians were singing, the ice storm was behind us, and our family’s average attractiveness level had just doubled.

I didn’t even think about a drink until we ran into some traffic on the Henry Hudson Bridge.

CHAPTER TWO
The Puppy

W
HEN YOU’RE BUYING A DOG
, you’re buying a tragedy. But when you’re buying an Hola, you’re buying a farce.

That first night she cried herself to sleep, and frankly so did I. The puppy books had warned us that the transition would be difficult for her—she’d just spent eight weeks lying in a big pile of brothers and sisters and nuzzling her mom, after all. A cold wood floor in the middle of winter next to a couple of un-demonstrative Midwestern white people must have seemed like an anticlimax.

Luckily, dogs have a five-minute memory. Every day is
Groundhog Day
. Next morning, our little bundle greeted the dawn with a big yawn and stretch, started pumping her white-tipped tail like an oar through the river of time, bared all her ivory teeth in what the good-natured would see as a smile, and immediately gave herself a job she would keep during our entire life together: Daddy’s wake-up alarm.

From the beginning, if I was in bed and it was dawn somewhere in the Western world, Hola was filled with a sense of injustice. She’d whine and wheedle and, if that didn’t work, leap onto the bed and start practicing the cha-cha on my chest.

“It’s like she wants you to go to work,” Gloria said. “Isn’t it cute?”

“Cute is not the word.”

“Dog food isn’t cheap, you know. She’s a sensible girl.”

“Sensible is not the word.”

“Oh, look, she’s even breaking in your work shoes for you.”

My wife, she left alone. Gloria could sleep until noon and often, frankly, did. But could I catch a couple extra z’s on a cold weekend morning when I had no plans and a hangover with a personality? Not in this doggie’s lifetime.

Later, I found out it’s not uncommon for breeds like the Bernese mountain dog to give themselves a task and execute it faithfully, whether anybody asked them or not. They are part of the working group, a herd of hardy northern breeds like the malamute and Siberian husky that can’t guard anything and don’t like to fetch. They’re muscular, snow-loving animals who don’t want to change their minds. Berners were bred by Swiss dairy farmers to haul milk carts to market, so unless they’re yanking some dumb jug around town, they just aren’t happy.

Since Hola was a morning person, and my wife most definitely was not, the dog and I started every day in a state of culture shock. Not only was she the first dog I ever owned; she was the first dog I ever really knew. If I went over to a friend’s apartment or on an outing and there were dogs in the picture, I just stood to one side. They were like a TV commercial that I put on mute.

Of course, it’s also true that Gloria and I were Hola’s first humans. And despite our Ivy League degrees and theoretically larger forebrains, she found us remarkably easy to train.

It may be possible to make more mistakes with a quadruped than we did, but it wouldn’t be easy.

Take the critical task of housebreaking. The number one reason dogs are abandoned to shelters is this bad boy, and we were ready with an action plan. It consisted of us running outside
every time Hola squinted, waiting for an hour in the sleet, giving up, and hauling her back inside, only to be treated to a grand production number followed by a TV-ready grin that seemed to say:
Thanks for bringing me back in, guys; I really had to go
.

“This is ridiculous,” I said. “That dog can’t be trained.”

“She’s trained all right,” said Gloria, ordering yet another carpet online from the Pottery Barn. “We trained her to go on the carpet. Always in that one spot there.”

“How’d we do that?”

“I don’t know. Maybe it’s because you didn’t clap that time she went outside.” We’d been told you were supposed to treat an outdoor event like the dog just won an Oscar.

“I’m not going to applaud a crap. Listen to yourself.”

“All I’m saying is, you’re not consistent.”

“I’m consistent, all right,” I said, popping open another Heinie. “Consistently annoyed. I don’t know why we had to get such a big—”

“She’s a good girl. She just needs a little help.”

At this point our so-called good girl was dipping into a copy of Nora Roberts’s
Midnight Bayou
. Very studious. She’d torn off the cover and was working her way through chapter 2. Rarely have I seen someone so thoroughly enjoy a book.

Then there was Hola’s campaign to get me to carry her around. Berners aren’t always very big. For a couple of months in the beginning of their lives, they’re about the size of a watermelon.

Gloria had a name for me. She called me The Holavator.

We lived up two flights of stairs, and when Hola was little I would carry her when she needed to go out. When she got bigger, she expected the same treatment. Every walk with me was a dead stop at the top of the stairs, a plaintive look up at me, and a quick flash of the browns.

As I carried her up and down, she looked around like a little periscope, engaging the wonder of the world. She was happy. On the other hand, as she ballooned in size, I was in danger of needing physical therapy to realign my back. Before long, I had to decommission The Holavator.

By which time she had quietly moved on to stage two of her plan.

Consisting of a subtle shift in her sleeping position. Bernese are peripatetic snoozers, moaning and wandering around all night like they need to police some invisible cows. In the puppy years, since I outsourced things like housebreaking and deworming to my wife and insourced things like snuggling and petting to myself, Hola decided to do most of her wandering around me.

At a certain point, when she was about two years old, she started hopping onto the bed in the middle of the night and stretching out between us.

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