Black Ribbon (5 page)

Joy’s eyes darted to Bingo. She tightened her grip on Lucky. “Well, how could he? I mean, poor Lucky only weighs fifteen pounds, and he really isn’t used to big dogs. He’s scared of them.”

“Should’ve taken him to puppy kindergarten,” Eva snapped.

Shameful apology pinched Joy’s face. “I didn’t know about it then. When I got Lucky, I didn’t know anything.” She paused. “He came from a pet shop. I just didn’t know.” She massaged the little dog’s big, hairy ears. “He isn’t show quality. We had him neutered.” She took a breath. “But Lucky is a very good dog. He’s great with kids, he loves everyone, and he’s
so
smart. I didn’t want a show dog, anyway. I just wanted a pet.”

I could almost read the words about to spring from the pendulous lips of Eva’s pushed-in bulldog face:
You sure got one
, she was about to say. Person-to-person and in my
Dog’s Life
column and articles, I am an ardent bad-mouther of pet shops, the puppy mills that supply them, and the entire wholesale commercial dog industry. But Joy had already gotten the message.

I spoke up. “Lucky has a very sweet face.”

Joy’s whole body radiated pleasure. “Thank you. But
your
dog is really beautiful.”

“Thanks.” I felt awkward, as if I’d made a polite remark about some ghastly art-object of Joy’s, a Day-Glo matador on black velvet, a lamp in the shape of Michelangelo’s David, and in return, she’d praised my Rembrandt.

“Good-looking dog,” conceded Eva, eyes on Rowdy. “Maybe a little small for the breed,” she told Joy, “but he’s still a good-looking dog.”

I am the first person to admit to the faults in my dogs. Kimi lacks Rowdy’s perfect ear set. One of my goldens, Danny, had a gay tail; he carried it a little too far above the horizontal.
Gay
has nothing to do with sexual preference, by the way; in fact, whenever Danny was anywhere near a bitch in season, I always wished it did.

“Which breed did you have in mind?” I asked Eva.

She looked baffled.

“Never mind,” I said.
Be a tree.
But on another occasion, I realized, maybe I actually would rather get bitten.

“EVA SPITTELER is a prize
b-i-t-c-h.”

Cam White lowered her voice to spell out the word. Even without the special treatment, the bitch-as-in-s.o.b. meaning would have been unambiguous, and as for
prize
, well, if Eva had been the only dog entered in a kiddie pet parade, she still wouldn’t have made it into the ribbons.

To get away from Eva and Bingo, I’d pretended to have forgotten something in my cabin. After I returned there and waited a few minutes, I reemerged and immediately spotted two Lodge sisters, Cam White and Ginny Garabedian. I’d seen Cam in the ring, and we’d hung around together at shows, but I also knew her from photos in
Front and Finish
, which perhaps I should explain is the official publication of the Exhausted Order of Obedience Fanatics, a monthly tabloid for dog trainers that’s crammed with pictures of OTCH dogs (Obedience Trial Champions); ads for equipment, videos, trials, and, yes, indeed, dog camps; and chatty, informative columns about everything from the evils of animal-rights extremism to the methods of the top handlers to what
are euphemistically referred to as the “challenges” of working with northern breeds.
(Front and Finish
, P.O. Box 333, Galesburg, IL 61402-0333. See? We aren’t a
secret
society at all.)

As I was explaining, Cam White had an OTCH sheltie named Nicky who appeared in
Front and Finish
in his own right, sometimes with a grinning Cam at his side, and who also inspected the reader from the photo at the top of Cam’s column, which was about the fine points of the obedience regulations. In the typical column, Cam presented a scoring dilemma that she then resolved.
At a recent outdoor trial
, a reader would write,
mine was the first dog in Open A. On the Retrieve on Flat, he was casting back and forth in long grass looking for his dumbbell when he came across what the spectators later described as the remains of a peanut butter sandwich. After wolfing it down, he gave a loud burp and then promptly located and retrieved the dumbbell. The judge took a substantial deduction. Shouldn’t we have been allowed to repeat the exercise?
And Cam would discuss the judge’s obligation to inspect the ring, distinguish between the excess length of the grass and the presence of the sandwich, explain that the judge could have permitted the dog to repeat the exercise, opine that the deduction was for slowness in retrieving rather than for eating or burping, lament the failure of clubs to follow the regulations stating that grass is supposed to be “cut short,” and argue that the regulations should be revised to specify precisely how short, preferably in millimeters. Then she’d launch into the fascinating theoretical question of whether burping alone merited a deduction and, if it did, how many points it should cost.

The obsessive streak evident in Cam’s dog writing harmonized with her almost compulsive neatness. Her clothes retained visible creases—deliberate ones, that is—and her short, dark hair waved in evenly spaced rows of controlled curls. Her lipstick never smudged. Her mascara never ran. She arrived at shows with her gear meticulously packed in clever canvas cases she’d designed and sewn herself. Nicky was always under
perfect control. Although the Shetland sheepdog is to the rough-coated collie what the Shetland pony is to the full-size horse, sheltie people resent having their dogs demeaned as miniature collies. Thus I hesitate to report that the sable-and-white Nicky really looked a lot like a rerun of Lassie on a very small screen.

Cam was in her early or midthirties, about my age. Ginny Garabedian, her companion and cabinmate at Waggin’ Tail, looked about sixty, as she’d done for the ten years I’d known her and would probably continue to do for another two or three decades. An AKC tracking judge and breeder of Labrador retrievers, Ginny was a compact, sturdy person who braided her gray hair into an extremely long plait that she wrapped around and around her head and fastened tightly in place. Bareheaded, she looked as if she wore an elaborately woven basket upturned on her head. Like a lot of tracking people, however, she frequently wore a real hat, and when I first met her, the double
chapeau
effect always made me wonder whether Ginny had some haberdashery-specific neurological disorder that caused her to perceive two hats as one.

After a while, though, I learned to ignore the oddity of Ginny’s head. For one thing, I ran into her a lot and got used to it. She showed in breed, casually and routinely put Novice obedience titles on her dogs, taught tracking clinics, attended seminars on canine nutrition and diseases, wrote a few articles for the dog magazines, belonged to D.W.A.A.—the Dog Writers’ Association of America—and otherwise gaited my own rings of the
haut monde du chien.
For another thing, I learned something about Ginny that diverted me from her trivial quirk of appearance, namely, that she had outlived five husbands. I was astounded. Topped by the plait alone, Ginny had a vigorous, outdoorsy, and distinctly unisex attractiveness. If she’d been a bird, I thought, she’d have belonged to some appealing species shown in the field guides with a single illustration and the notation “sexes alike.” After I heard about the
five dead husbands, I wondered about them whenever I saw Ginny. So complete was her dedication to dogs that I found it difficult to imagine her being interested in one man, never mind five, unless they’d all looked like Labrador retrievers. Or maybe, with canine opportunism, she’d married the men to support her dogs. If the full truth be known, I also wondered what had killed the five husbands and how much life insurance each had carried. As it turned out, everyone else in dogs harbored the same suspicions about Ginny that I did. Never having been married, however, I kept mine to myself until the day a dog acquaintance of Ginny’s and mine confronted me on the subject. “Look,” she said, “here are the rest of us, fighting and scheming and begging whenever it’s time to get a new show puppy, and then there’s Ginny, and, I mean, you have to ask yourself: What did
she
do to deserve that kind of luck?”

“Prize
b-i-t-c-h,
” Cam repeated. “And in my area, everywhere you go, there’s Eva.” Cam’s area, if I remembered correctly, was New York or New Jersey. By
everywhere
, she did not mean supermarkets, movie theaters, and dinner parties; she meant only the places that counted. “You can’t go to a show without seeing her! And she is
so
obnoxious. She’ll stand outside the breed rings and say awful things about everyone’s dogs—”

“At the top of her lungs, too,” added Ginny, who was not, by the way, wearing a hat. We were standing in the shade of a big old white birch midway between my cabin and the main lodge.

“Yes,” Cam agreed, “and she doesn’t know what she’s talking about, either, and Ginny, I am really sorry to say this, but that dog does not belong on the grounds of an AKC show.” Cam and her husband, I remembered, had connections at AKC. Among other things, he was a delegate. For AKC types like Cam—and like me, as well—the fancy spins on the axis of the American Kennel Club. A dog with Bingo’s temperament,
I should point out, didn’t belong on the grounds of any show, AKC, UKC, or any other KC, either.

“
I
don’t mind,” Ginny said. “I know when I’ve made a mistake. I should never, ever have sold to Eva. She ruined that lovely puppy. I have never had temperament problems in my lines. My dogs live right in the house with me, and they all get along, and I can take them anywhere, and they never so much as look cross-eyed at another dog.” As if to verify Ginny’s claim, the chocolate Lab bitch she had with her strolled over to Rowdy, lowered her head, tilted it, stuck out a long pink tongue, and licked Rowdy’s muzzle. He regarded her with the air of an emperor accepting obeisance from a serf. “This one’s the worst of all,” Ginny commented. “Her name’s Wiz, but everyone always ends up calling her Kissy Face.”

“I knew that dog of Eva’s looked familiar,” I said happily, “but I couldn’t place him. Bingo. Bingo looks like that big male of yours. I knew he reminded me …”

Ginny’s face contorted in pain. Her body seemed to shrink.

Cam caught my eye, frowned, and briefly raised a finger to her lips. “Merlin died,” she informed me quietly.

“I am
so
sorry,” I said. “I had no idea. He was a wonderful dog. So beautiful.”

And he was, too. Without spilling the sordid contents of “the Labrador mess”—a prolonged controversy about revising the AKC standard of the Labrador retriever—let me explain that the breed has become separated into two distinct lines, bench and field, show dogs and hunting dogs, and that Ginny’s were show dogs. So dirty and slippery are the grounds around the Labrador mess that I’m afraid to say what Ginny’s dogs looked like lest I skid on some politically charged word and tumble in. Let’s say that Merlin had been a big-boned, flashy-looking yellow dog with many titles and tons of charisma. Or let’s just say that Ginny loved him a lot.

“I’m
so
sorry,” I repeated. Ginny’s pain was contagious. I patted my thigh to summon Rowdy and dug my fingers into
the depths of his coat. Then I ran my fingertips over his wet nose. The gesture was completely irrational. Rowdy had been bouncing around sniffing tree trunks, lifting his leg, making friends with Wiz, and accepting her drooly kisses. I didn’t need to touch him to make sure that he was alive. I felt a renewed urgency about calling Leah.
A mistake
, I thought again, remembering the sympathy card.
A simple error. Not Kimi.

“Thank you,” Ginny said. “People have been …”

“It helps,” I said. “It helps a little.”

“Not really.” Cam shook her head. “Nothing does, really.”

“It would be worse if no one gave a damn,” I said.

“That’s how it is for most people,” Ginny said. “They can’t even talk about it. They’re afraid that someone’s going to say, you know, ‘only a dog.’ ”

“One thing about this place,” said Cam, “is that no one’s going to say that. Everyone here understands.”

I nodded.

“I was going to bring Merlin,” Ginny told me, “and I had to call Maxine and tell her, and then when I got here, she’d left a card.”

“In our room,” Cam said. “We’re sharing.” Cam’s face and tone lightened. Her smile was wry. “But Max did forget to sign it.”

Ginny shrugged. “Maxine’s been running her tail off. It’s a wonder she remembered at all.”

In the couple of seconds since I’d last had my eye on Rowdy, he’d wandered to one of the many covered trash barrels stationed here and there on the grounds. Fastened to the side of each was a big plastic bag that held a large supply of small plastic bags to be used in cleaning up after dogs and then deposited in the big barrels. The barrels were admittedly a sort of tree-trunk brown, and this one must already have acquired the interesting scent of other dogs. Even so. “Rowdy, not there!” I ordered him. His glance called me a
fool, but he dutifully lowered his leg. “Good boy.” I switched my attention back to Cam and Ginny. “Which cabin are you in?”