Black Ribbon (12 page)

Within a few minutes, the swimmer surged close to us, threw out a hand, and grabbed the dock. As I scrambled out of the way, a woman’s round-bellied body in a dark tank suit rose from the lake.

“Whew! Caught breaking my own rule!” Maxine McGuire exclaimed cheerfully. “Were you going to snitch on me?”

I laughed nervously. “Of course not. I was just soaking my feet and enjoying the night.”

Maxine pattered down the dock, picked up a towel I hadn’t noticed, and started to give herself a rubdown. “I never get a chance to swim anymore, but after dinner, ten people started pawing and nipping at me like teething puppies, and I said to myself, ‘What the heck! It’s my camp.’ And I feel a lot better now.”

“They were upset about the sympathy cards?”

“Oh, yeah, that and those darned silly brochures. Some joker left a lot of stuff about pet cemeteries and things, all mixed up with the dog magazines I put out. It’s just someone’s dumb idea of a practical joke. You watch. Next thing, he’ll go around short-sheeting the beds. It’s camp; you’ve got to expect it.”

“Phyllis Abbott didn’t take it quite that way,” I pointed out.

Max wrapped the towel around herself. “Well, if I may say so, neither did you. Get up early tomorrow morning, Holly, and let your friend there try lure coursing. It’s in the field by the parking lot. Six-fifteen. He’ll love it.”

Back in my cabin, as I was brushing my teeth and getting ready for bed, I decided to take Maxine’s advice. Stupid practical jokes didn’t deserve any attention at all. I’d get up early and let Rowdy chase a plastic bag. I was just opening the front window when Don Abbott’s voice reached me. It sounded a little thick. The Abbotts, too, must have opened the front window, and Don must have been near it. I couldn’t make out his words. He rumbled something, paused, and issued what sounded like a question. I assumed that, as usual, he was using the portable phone. He spoke and paused a couple of times. Then the call apparently ended. A few seconds later, I caught Phyllis’s voice. Don replied. His tone was angry and unmistakably demeaning. Until then, I’d heard only speech contours, intonations, patterns. This time, I understood one word. In dog fancy, of course, overhearing the word
bitch
is in itself meaningless. Don Abbott could have been talking about or maybe even to Edwina, the Pom. What gave the word its nasty charge was the way Don spoke it. I was certain he wasn’t speaking to or about a female dog. To my ear, he didn’t sound like a dog person at all. He just sounded like an ugly drunk swearing at his sober wife.

IN THE EARLY LIGHT of that Monday morning, the elusive white prey that zipped around the green field ahead of wolf-gray Rowdy might have been an Arctic hare, a ptarmigan, or some other little snow-white creature that fled, tarried, veered, zoomed out of reach, slowed to a tantalizing creep, turned a corner, and sped off again. Flashing across the field, hindquarters driving, forelegs reaching, body stretched, dark coat glistening, Rowdy became the soul of dog made manifest: a mythic creature of the Inuit pantheon, Primal Dog, Every Dog, Essence of Dog Itself. The prey at last between his teeth, Rowdy shook his head once, very hard, thus efficiently snapping the neck of the plastic bag.

An hour later, after I’d fed and crated Rowdy, taken a wake-up shower, and observed Elsa the Chesapeake as she intently rearranged the rocks at the edge of the lake, I was sitting in the dining room at a windowside table that gave a great view of the lure coursing. When I glanced out, two basenjis were sprinting around the field giving all the other dogs—and one malamute owner—a little demonstration of precisely how the
sport was supposed to be practiced. I didn’t mind. Far from it. I feel an odd sort of breed loyalty toward basenjis, which in most essential points of character are small, short-haired, barkless, curly-tailed African malamutes, creatures that had once had to fend for themselves.

My breakfast tray contained a glass of orange juice, a big plate of scrambled eggs, a little plate of giant blueberry muffins, and a cup of not-bad coffee, the entire meal prepared by someone other than me in a kitchen to be cleaned by someone other than me and served on dishes to be washed by someone other than me. I was alone at the table. Neither Eva Spitteler nor Don Abbott was even in the dining room. The people at the other tables were strangers to me. I knew them anyway; they all had dogs. Back out in the real world, some people had dogs, some didn’t, and all too many of those with dogs didn’t actually understand dogs and didn’t necessarily give a damn about them. Here in this little canine ivory tower, however, every single person had at least one dog, and everyone had come here, as had I, in a way, in search of dog heaven. I had the comforting sense of having cracked up and landed in a specialized asylum in which everyone else enjoyed a form of madness identical to my own.

On the table in front of my tray rested the Waggin’ Tail schedule, a pen, and a yellow legal pad on which I was listing activities to attend: agility, advanced show obedience, and, if I could fit it in, something called jumps chutes that I’d never heard of and thought we might try anyway. First aid and CPR? Before and after lunch, I had to steal some time to work on a column, but then I intended to catch a little of the afternoon’s Canine Good Citizen testing, mostly because, like a lot of other obedience people, I’d initially underrated the value of the program and now needed to make amends for a couple of elitist remarks about it in old columns. In the late afternoon, we’d go to drill team and to flyball. Yes, drill team. Remember drill team? High school? Brass band music and all. Marching
in formation. With dogs. I hoped that none of my highbrow Cambridge neighbors ever found out, because if caught and convicted, Rowdy and I would find ourselves swiftly deported across the river to Boston. (“You were having
what?”
demands the judge. “This is Cambridge! We expect better than
that!
Anyone can have
fun.”
Bang! goes the gavel. “Guilty as charged!” A gang of Harvard graduates starts pelting us with a weird variety of objects banned within the Cambridge city limits—romance novels, containers of green and blue eye shadow, sharp-edged cartons of flowered wallpaper—as Rowdy and I beat it across the bridge and celebrate our escape by parading along the southern banks of the Charles to the strains of John Philip Sousa.)

And flyball: The dog runs over a series of jumps, gets to a box, and whacks it with his paw, thereby releasing a tennis ball that he catches and carries back over the jumps, at which point the next dog … Well, it may sound silly to people, but dogs think the flyball box is the greatest human invention since frozen Bil Jac, and if you don’t know what
that
is, I pity your poor canine pal.

Our first postbreakfast activity, agility, took place in what I think was ordinarily an annex to the resort’s main parking lot, a large clearing in the woods located at the end of a short dirt road. Let’s get the camp layout straight. If you stood facing away from the lake with your back to the big main lodge, ahead of you was the blacktopped parking lot, filled, of course, with vans, station wagons, and other dog-person vehicles, most of them bearing bumper stickers that ranged from the usual loyalty oaths (“I LOVE MY WEST HIGHLAND WHITE TERRIER”) and admonitions to tailgaters (“CAUTION: SHOW DOGS!”) to bold declarations of opinion (“ALL MEN ARE ANIMALS, BUT SOME MAKE NICE PETS”). To the right of the parking lot was the field used in the early morning for lure coursing and, later in the day, for drill team and various other activities. At the far end of that
field was a big green-and-white-striped tent so festive-looking that I half expected to hear the cries of bar mitzvah celebrants stunned to discover themselves double-booked in the middle of dog camp. As it turned out, the tent was devoted to obedience. To the left, not far from the lodge, was the bunkhouse. The woods began immediately in back of the bunkhouse and ran along the edge of the parking lot to the little dirt road that led to the agility area.

Agility! Of the many orders and allied organizations that constitute the freemasonry of dog fancy, agility alone requires a large and elaborately furnished temple in which to perform its rites. The first-degree rituals of obedience permit nothing more than a dog and a six-foot lead; and, by AKC decree, the regalia used in higher levels of the craft must be of spartan simplicity: flat-white jumps—no gloss, not even semi—relieved only by the stripes of black on the bar jump and the unobtrusive numbers showing the heights of the high-jump boards—black, too, and purely functional.

But every temple of agility represents the glorious and elaborate union of the Tall Cedars of the Obstacle with the Order of the Rainbow for Dogs. Dispersed throughout the big clearing in the woods were an astonishing number and variety of structures not merely painted in brilliant colors, but also trimmed, striped, and embellished in primary green, sunshine yellow, vivid blue, glowing purple, vibrating red, screaming orange, and every other bright color in between. An agility course suggests a schoolyard playground designed by a gymnastically inclined ex-army sergeant turned dog obedience instructor. This equipment looked brand-new. The pause table hadn’t even been painted. It sat on shiny metal legs, and the dogs would pause on a top of raw wood. The seesaw was the kind now deemed unsafe for children, except that it was set low to the ground for our group of novice dogs. Also, its board lacked the usual handles, of course, and every twelve
inches or so, a little strip of wood ran across to provide footing for the dogs. One of the tunnels was a big, tough version of the long, flexible fabric-covered ones sold for children; the other was an open barrel with what looked like a gigantic footless stocking pulled over one end. The dog walk, a canine balance beam, was a narrow horizontal board with ramps at each end. Except for the purple, pink, and green stripes, the PVC bar jumps were identical to Utility practice jumps, and if I’ve lost you, imagine a broom handle held horizontal between two vertical supports. What looked like more broom handles stuck up in rows from metal supports on the ground: weave poles. Heavy chains attached to sturdy wooden frames supported tape-wrapped tires from cars and motorcycles.

By far the biggest piece of equipment was the A-frame, a massive obstacle consisting of two wide ramps, one going up, the other down; think of an eighteen-foot section of a seaside boardwalk hinged in the middle and raised at the apex to make a giant A. Squatting directly in front of the A-frame, blithely depositing what no one wants to step in, was Eva Spitteler’s big yellow Lab, Bingo. Twenty-six feet away, as far away as a number 8 flex lead allows, Eva was staring upward in apparent search of any wood warblers that might be flitting around high up in the tree canopy. Or maybe she was seeing imaginary creatures in the cumulus clouds, listening to the distant scolding of a red squirrel, wondering whether to include pewter-encrusted medallions of Saint Francis of Assisi in her catalog, or planning a random act of kindness. I do not know.

Bingo finished. As Eva began to reel him in, I hugged Rowdy to my left side and quietly delivered an abbreviated version of the you-buddy-are-not-the-policeman-of-the-dog-world lecture that opens with a survey of the vile and provocative behaviors in which undisciplined dogs may engage, moves to an acknowledgement of the natural wish to impose order on chaos, and concludes with a happy reminder that suppressing
primitive urges is the price we pay for the multitudinous benefits of civilization. Although the lecture is not meant for human ears, my therapist friend Rita once listened in and accused me of stealing it from Sigmund Freud, who, as I was glad to inform Rita, was a devoted dog owner who’d undoubtedly developed these and numerous other ideas in consultation with his beloved chow chow. I mean, if you wanted to understand what Freud wanted to understand—sex, aggression, appetite, rivalry, and house-training, for starters—who’d be the real expert? A stuffy old Viennese doctor? So if you’re an academic psychologist hungry to publish, there’s a paper in this for you: “The Critical Role of the Chow Chow in the Development of Psychoanalytic Theory: Freud or His Dog? A Controversy Resolved by Reference to the Concept of Castration Anxiety.”

When I looked up, Heather was standing next to Eva waving a small plastic bag and pointing toward the A-frame. With a look of baffled innocence on her bulldog face, Eva was shaking her head back and forth. I moved a little closer.

“You’re obviously mistaken,” said Eva. “It must have been someone else’s dog.”

“I saw him with my own eyes!” Heather told her. “Not thirty seconds ago! You were looking away.”

Eva was indignant. “Bingo hasn’t been out of my sight one second! I don’t know what dog did that, but it wasn’t him, and I haven’t paid all this money to come here and spend my time shoveling up shit after other people’s dogs, and, if you want my opinion, since you asked for it, for what we’re paying here, you ought to be doing it yourself and saying thanks, because if this is how we’re going to be treated, no one’s coming back! And you can goddamn well tell Max McGuire I said so.”

Heather turned geranium red. For a few seconds, she seemed to hold her breath. Then she gave in. “This time,” she said, “I’ll clean it up. And I hope you understand: Nagging people about this is part of my job. If we leave this place
a mess, Max isn’t going to be able to use it again, and part of my job, besides agility, is making sure that camp’s welcome back next year, okay? So no hard feelings. You ever done any agility before?”