Read Bad Dog Online

Authors: Martin Kihn

Bad Dog (7 page)

As soon as the snack appears, she forgets what she’s about and raises her body, lowers her hackles, widens her eyes, and trots toward me.

“Sit,” I say, and she snatches the treat from my hand.

I lean forward again and, after a few moments of wrestling and wriggling, get the leash around her body, and the horror movie scene winds down.

I look over at Gloria. She’s still facing the wall, holding her arm.

“I’m so sorry, hon,” I say. “What happened?”

Hola’s standing there calmly, staring at my coat pocket.

Gloria’s shaking her head from side to side, stunned, as though she just can’t talk. Then she turns around and steps away from the wall, and I see her eyes are moist and determined.

“Get her out of here,” she chokes out.

“What, hon?”

“I want that
 … dog …
out of here. Now.”

“But—”

“Now. Please.”

There is nothing for me to do but take the dog outside. I was going to suggest locking her in the bathroom a while, but Gloria seems adamant.

“I’ll be right back,” I say, having no idea what I’m going to do with Hola.

She pads out happily enough beside me, and I close the door behind us and listen at it for a minute or two—and sure enough, Gloria is crying quietly, gasping for air between almost-silent convulsions. I feel like Hola is gnawing on my exposed, tired brain.

We get outside and the night is offensively beautiful: cool breeze along the Hudson River, lights a-twinkle in New Jersey, the cemetery stuffed with the glorious Revolutionary War dead. I half want to join them.

“This is terrible,” I say to Hola.

What, Dad?

“You can’t do that. It’s not fair.”

What did I do?

“You were horrible. You attacked Gloria.”

It sure is dark out here. Is that a snowman? I hate snowmen!

What I do is lock Hola in the backseat of the car and leave the window open a crack. “I’ll come back for you in a little while,” I tell her. “I have to talk to Mommy now. Wait here.”

Where are you going? Stop!

When I get back, Gloria is sitting at the round kitchen table with raw eyes but is no longer crying. She’s frighteningly calm. Doesn’t ask me where I put the dog; doesn’t care. Quietly—frightened myself, to tell the truth—I sit across from her, and she looks up at me with a lucid determination, like a lawyer who’s sure of the precedents.

Her hands are balled up, her breathing short and shallow.

“How’s your asthma?” I say when I can’t stand the silence anymore.

“I’m afraid of my own dog,” she says. “I didn’t want to admit it before, but there it is. It’s like it doesn’t matter what I do. I’m at the end of my—”

Hold that thought. Tears are back.

So I slide my chair next to hers and put my arm around her, but she shrugs it off, and I’m thinking,
Please don’t leave me. Not now. Not when it’s starting to change
.

If you want something you never had, you have to do something you never did.

“We’ll go back to training,” I say, getting an idea. “I’ll go this time too. I’ll work on the homework they give us. I know I said it was stupid before but—”

“It doesn’t work. It never works.”

“I’ll … I’ll hire someone to walk the dog for you. You don’t
have to do anything. I’ll take her out early and we’ll have somebody come in the afternoon.”

She is shaking her head.

“No,” she says. “I should be able to walk my own dog. There’s something wrong here.”

“What about the monks?” I say, referring to the Monks of New Skete, legendary dog trainers and authors who also take in rehab patients. “Or that guy on TV? The Dog Whisperer? We can send her to some camp somewhere. We’ll get her reprogrammed.”

She stands up, pushing the stiff-backed steel chair away from the table, and glares down with that furious determination I’ve always admired—except when it’s pointed at me.

“It’s not just the dog, Marty. It’s everything. It’s you.”

“Me?”

“You’re so fucking self-centered. You think you’re suffering … you’re in pain … and now you stopped drinking. Well, good for you. But you’re not even looking at me. Or Hola. You can’t even see us.”

“I’m not … I don’t—”

“What do you think it’s been like for me, huh? All these years with you
not even being here?
You weren’t a loud drunk—I’ll give you that—but you’ve been ignoring me for too long. And it hurts. And now—now the dog is so horrible. I got the dog—”

She’s crying again but doesn’t stop talking:

“—I got her,” she’s saying, “because you were never home. She was going to. Be. My. Friend.”

All I can do is watch as she shudders and wipes her eyes with the back of her hand and tries to catch her breath again and again. I want to hug her, but she hates me so much.

Then she says, simply:

“I can’t do this anymore. I love you, I think. But it’s just—it’s too much for me.”

And there it is. The words from your nightmare, available now in real life.

I’m starting to stand, say something, when she pushes past me and goes to the door and goes out, closing it behind her, and I hear her walking down the hallway outside our apartment by the time I can move my legs to follow her.

We go together to the car, which is parked on the side of Riverside overlooking the Hudson. A couple times I try to say something, anything, and she tells me to stop. It’s hopeless; it really is. I can’t remember when I’ve been so scared in my life. It’s like I’m standing in the middle of the Henry Hudson Highway with my eyes closed.

Too late I remember Hola is in the car. Gloria sees her outline in the backseat.

“You have the leash?” she asks me.

“It’s still on her.”

“Get that dog out of there.”

“Listen,” I say, suddenly hoarse. “I’ll take … I’ll take her to the pound. Tomorrow. She’s not worth all this.”

Gloria shakes her head. I’m not sure what she means.

I unlock the car, open the back door, and Hola hops out. Her tail is wagging and her eyes are bright. She’s wearing what I think of as her seriocomic expression. It is different from her other expression, with the upturned corners of her mouth, which is simply comic.

“Bye,” Gloria says, and she gets into the car.

Hola and I stand on the curb, and we watch her drive away toward the George Washington Bridge.

• • •

Later, after I’ve fed the dog for the second last time, I look through Gloria’s closets and drawers, in a mounting panic, and realize she must have packed all her stuff into the trunk of the Echo before I even got home that night.

CHAPTER NINE
The God Shot

T
HE NEXT DAY IS A
S
ATURDAY
.

Hola gets me up early, although I haven’t slept, and I pack her into a rented silver Honda Zipcar whose inside smells like a barn and looks like a lint trap. We pull out onto Riverside Drive and pilot due south toward the North Shore Animal League, because they say they will do everything they can to find the dog a home without having to kill it. I’m not hopeful. They probably won’t accept a dog with Hola’s temperament. If they don’t, I will have to take her to the regular shelter, where she will most likely be put to sleep.

Between you, me, and the sunroof, I have no idea what I am going to do after I drop Hola off, and I’m not sure I care. This is a terrible, empty, airless morning, and it’s never going to end.

In the rearview mirror, Hola’s grin looks troubled. She’s always loved a road trip but knows something is wrong.

“I screwed up again,” I say to her. “I can’t figure this out.”

Can you crack a window back here?
she seems to say.
Thanks!

“Gloria’s so mad at me. And you know what’s the sad thing? I agree with her. I put her through a lot of—hey, don’t look at me like that. You didn’t help. It’s like we were attacking her from both sides and … and …”

Don’t cry, Dad
, says the little Hola in the mirror.
You can’t see the road
.

I pull over and wedge the Honda into a slot at the side of Riverside Drive, and with the engine running I let it go like never before: deep, guttural moans that seem to want to turn me inside out. Hola whines too, echoing my feelings. After a while of this, we’re cried out. I’m hugging my dog between the seats, and she’s got her paws draped over my arms in solidarity.

We’re not totally alone, Dad
, she’s saying.
We have each other. Right?

“No.”

We’re totally amazing! I’m just incredible, and you are the best human ever!

“Well …”

We just need to prove to Mommy how great we are
.

“I don’t know, Hola. I can’t keep you. It’s too late.”

You are so wrong, Dad!
she says.
As usual. Can we go to the park? Do you have any pretzels? I love you!

There is a well-established law in the unwritten annals of canine-human psychology that it is impossible to maintain a conviction of universal despair for a significant length of time when you are in proximity to a Bernese mountain dog. Looking at Hola’s sincere, tender face gazing at me and then, even more tenderly, ogling a handsome rottweiler being walked past our window, I was able to wipe my eyes with a Wendy’s napkin left behind by the ZipCar’s previous pilot, breathe in deeply, and feel almost ready to scheme.

What this scheme will look like, I have no clue. Beyond the obvious: it should not involve me drinking again.

“What I see in you,” I say to Hola as I pull onto the drive, “I’ll never understand.”

What do I see in her? It’s complicated. One thing about Hola is she is very good looking. This is an objective fact I report. Don’t believe me?

So there.

She has big brown eyes that whisper:
You are beautiful too. We can be beautiful together. Do you have any cheesecake?

Her coat is lustrous and the kind of black that is so dark and pure it looks almost blue. I dyed my hair that color once, when I was sixteen, and I’ll never forget coming out of the bathroom and running into my mother. She took one look at the new me and said, “I guess we don’t have to worry about you going to the prom this year.”

The white blaze on Hola’s forehead is narrower than most people like, but it gives her a determined look. And she has what’s called a gay tail—meaning kinked—which she proudly
holds aloft at full mast, wagging sinuously like a white-tipped flag of triumph.

Dogs have feelings, the same ones we do. It’s obvious. They’re just much more committed to them.

Hola has a big smile she throws around town like a stack of religious pamphlets. The corners of her mouth elevate, and her head slopes down in that pose horses have when they’re super-relaxed. Especially when she is sitting on the bed between my wife and me and we are
both
petting her. That is when the world makes sense.

That moment, she is looking out the window at the deep blue wintery Hudson River and the suspiciously Floridian condos on the Jersey shore beyond.

“Where is Dog when I need Her?” I ask Hola.

Turns out, She is just waiting for the obedience trials to start.

When it was introduced by the American Kennel Club two decades ago, the Canine Good Citizen program was ridiculed by some in the hard-core obedience community.

Many committed trainers saw it as a distinctly second-rate, watered-down, reality TV version of the serious obedience trials that already existed, competitions where precision-heeling dyads earned titles such as Companion Dog and Utility Dog Excellent, and one superdog annually was awarded the title of National Obedience Champion at an invitation-only event. Technically, the NOC isn’t limited to golden retrievers and border collies, but it might as well be. A Bernese mountain dog has never even made the semifinals.

And of course, in thinking of the CGC as Obedience for Dummies, these trainers were right.

But serious dog trainers live in an alternate universe where people know what to do around dogs. They know the tenets
of operant conditioning and how to get a reliable recall. They know what a clicker is for.

“The competition obedience people thought of the CGC as fine for ‘pet people,’ ” says Susan Conant. “When it first came out, some of them thought that the program diverted owners from real obedience.”

Conant’s fictional detective says in a book written shortly after the test appeared: “My column [on the CGC] argued that clubs should support the program. My heart, however, quoted Winifred Gibson Strickland, author of
Expert Obedience Training for Dogs
, who says that if something is worth doing, it’s worth doing right. Obedience competition is an aristocratic meritocracy, and dogs deserve the chance to earn their titles.”

Doubters were missing the point, though. CGC is not about the dog—it’s about the human.

This human is a rudderless man-child on Riverside Drive, so I do what we’re supposed to do in the program when we don’t know what to do: ask for help.

I call my sponsor, Clark, a guy I found myself talking to almost every day, mostly about our dogs.

Other books

Touch by North, Claire
Take a Thief by Mercedes Lackey
Wait Till I Tell You by Candia McWilliam
I Rize by Anthony, S.T.
Coming Home for Christmas by Patricia Scanlan
Reckless Abandon by Andrea Randall
Shades of Earl Grey by Laura Childs


readsbookonline.com Copyright 2016 - 2024