Authors: Susan Conant
Finally, for the first time, he asked to see my dog. While he returned Sultan to his run, I went out to get Kimi.
“This is going to be strange, and it might get scary,” I warned her as I opened the tailgate and snapped on the chain leash. “And I know it’s a lot to ask. But if I don’t see for myself, I can’t write about it
very well, and if I don’t write about it, this crazy son of a bitch is going to keep on duping people into leaving their dogs here. And I know you can handle it. I have perfect confidence in you.” I stroked Kimi’s face. Direct eye contact makes some dogs uncomfortable. She met my gaze. I know I’m biased, but I’ll swear that the Alaskan malamute is the strongest, sweetest dog on earth, iron and honey.
To protect my hands in case I needed to grip the leash, I grabbed a pair of leather gloves from the front seat and pulled them on. Then I let Kimi move ahead of me to the barnlike building and deliberately trailed after her. Once we were inside, the scent of all the other dogs keyed Kimi up. When Brenner appeared through a door to the kennel area, I nervously said, “Now be a good girl. Sit down, Juneau?”
The dog’s name, preferably her own, comes first, of course. Besides, even a golden retriever, for God’s sake, won’t obey a question, and did I want Juneau to sit or to lie down? Except to pull happily toward the kennel door, Kimi ignored me.
“It isn’t time to play with other dogs now,” I said feebly. Then, still fighting the temptation to grab Kimi, beat it back to Cambridge, and settle for Jackie Miner’s story of how Brenner had treated Willie, I told him that I was sure I didn’t have the money to have him train Juneau for me. But I
did
need help. Couldn’t he give us just one lesson? He agreed. It galled me to pay cash, but the name printed on my checks is my own.
A good instructor occasionally borrows a dog to demonstrate something, but a genuine expert, if forced to work with only one half of the dog-handler team, will choose you, not your dog. Dogs learn fast. Real pros enjoy a challenge. Brenner led us back into
the big empty room, pulled a standard six-foot leather leash and an ordinary metal choke collar from his pocket, and slipped it over Kimi’s head. He snapped on the leather leash, removed that stupid flat collar and the chain leash, and handed them to me. I hadn’t expected him to teach like an expert, of course, but I was so inexperienced with really bad instructors that I’d thought I’d be the person at Kimi’s side. She kept her soft, intelligent eyes on me. More quickly than I’d expected, Brenner stepped to heel position on her right side, and I knew that the second she heard the word
heel
, she’d blow our cover.
Brenner was watching Kimi, not me. I cleared my throat and, catching her eye, raised my arm slightly and mouthed, “Up!” She growled and rose.
Over the years, I’d heard a lot of stories about barbaric methods employed and recommended by a few high-priced private trainers: If the dog jumps on you, slam your foot on his hind feet. If he barks and growls, squirt ammonia in his eyes. Ammonia! Jesus. If he challenges you, lift him up in the air and hurl him to the ground. Only now did I realize that I’d never quite believed the stories. I’d expected Brenner to act, but not to overreact so strongly and certainly not so quickly. With one sharp upward yank on the leather leash, he started to string up my dog.
You know what that means? It’s also called “hanging.” The choke collar is the noose, the leash is the rope, and the human arm is the gallows. Is it ever okay to string up a dog? Maybe, if it’s the only way to break up a dog fight or if it’s a last-resort effort to save a dog’s life by convincing him that biting people is absolutely taboo. Desperate? A pinch collar looks like an instrument of torture, a series of linked prongs, but it won’t damage the dog’s larynx.
I wasn’t packing a pinch collar, but those cheesy chain leashes turn out to have a use after all, at least if you’re wearing heavy leather gloves. Before Kimi’s front legs left the floor, I had a solid grip on the length of chain. As I’ve mentioned, an experienced handler glides into a fast pace. A few rapid steps positioned me directly behind Brenner, and with a single sweep over his head that was as smooth and natural as even the AKC could want, I wrapped the chain around his neck and yanked hard enough to remind him that
canis familiaris
isn’t the only species with a larynx. One firm jerk on a training collar works better than a hundred weak little tugs. When I want to yank, I yank
hard
.
“Brenner, you son of a bitch,” I told him, “drop that leash.” Training Rule One: Name first, then the command.
He complied. Although the chain must have hurt, I suspect that my effective weapon was, in fact, surprise. I do not look or sound like the kind of person who goes around half garrotting people with crummy chain leashes from discount department stores. Even so, before Brenner had time to recover from his state of shock, whether physical or mental, and before he could fetch Sultan, who really did scare me, I released my grip, left the chain draped around his neck, and swooped up Kimi’s leash. Then, with what the AKC calls “the utmost in willingness, enjoyment, and precision,” Kimi and I beat it out of there.
Front and Finish
is always publishing scrappy exchanges about what that key word,
utmost
, really means. Now I know.
Oh, except for Sultan. If you really love dogs, you’ll understand that I hated to leave him there. There must be a curse on German shepherds that
makes them attract the human extremes, the best and the worst, Steve Delaney and Dickie Brenner. A German shepherd or any other dog who’s been bred or trained to act vicious is a desecration. I mean that. A sacrilege. Ever read the Bible? Every dog wants nothing more than to play Ruth to your Naomi: “Whither thou goest, I will go; and where thou lodgest, I will lodge; thy people shall be my people; and thy God my God.”
About Sultan? The moral of the story is that if you own a German shepherd, be careful how you choose your God. Here endeth today’s Lesson.
God does not like modern English and holds a grudge against the whole twentieth century, or so you’d gather from how Cambridge celebrates Christmas. In normal places, people invite you to go out caroling and get together for a few drinks. But not in Cambridge. When I first got here, a guy asked me if I wanted to wassail. I thought he was propositioning me to do something so perverted that I’d never even heard of it.
Not long afterward, though, I lost my innocence: I went to the Christmas Revels in Sanders Theater. If I’d never met Steve, I’d probably have come home from Brenner’s and immediately gone out to spend the evening of December twenty-third decadently frolicking around in puff-sleeved peasant garb while an accompanist piped out a winter solstice tune on some cumbersome but authentic protorecorder with a range of three notes. Oh, well, the life wouldn’t have suited me anyway, and I’ve renounced it entirely, except to drag Steve down with me while I walk the streets of Harvard Square.
A heavily festooned giant evergreen loomed in front of the kiosk in the center of the Square. The subway entrance was moved years ago, and the Out
of Town Newsstand is a substantial business housed in a building that’s too big to be called “the kiosk,” but that’s exactly what it’s called. Kendall Square, near MIT, may be scientific, but Harvard Square is metaphysical. You have to be a visionary to find your way around; the evidence of your senses tells you nothing. Anyway, suspended over the streets that radiate out from the kiosk were the same kinds of silvery giant-candy-cane decorations and strings of multicolored lights that were swinging over a million American Main Streets. According to the sign flashing above one of the banks, the temperature was sixty-three degrees. Steve and I were wearing jeans and T-shirts. We hung around in front of the Coop for a few minutes to listen to a small Salvation Army band play a brassy “O Come, All Ye Faithful” or, Cambridge being Cambridge, “Adeste Fideles.” When the carol ended, we threw some quarters into a big kettle suspended on an iron tripod.
Then we rounded the corner at Nini’s and strolled into the Cambridge of Brattle Square, the atavistic, anglophile Cambridge of mimes, jugglers, sword swallowers, fire-eaters, acrobats, storytellers, and street musicians, including street musicians with Ph.D.’s who take offense if you mistake their viola da gambas for mere cellos. Violas da gamba? Damn. I’ll never fit in here. I mean, this is a place where you can state your occupation as bard, fifer, ballad-monger, or busker, and most people won’t even laugh. If you get asked what you want to drink, it’s perfectly okay to call for a tankard of mead. There are people here who not only can speak fluent Elizabethan English, but who never speak any other kind, for God’s sake. I love Cambridge. It’s a human dog show.
“So what did you want me to do?” I indignantly
asked Steve over the din of a female choir fervently caroling in what sounded like Russian. I’d filled him in on my visit to Anneliese, but he was more irked at my visit to Brenner than he was interested in the Bourques. “Take Jackie’s word for it? Look, when you want to make a diagnosis, you want to see the animal, don’t you? You don’t just want to hear someone else describe the problem. You want to see for yourself. It’s the same thing. I wasn’t going to leave Kimi there, you know, and obviously, I wasn’t about to let him hurt her. I didn’t, did I?”
He shook his head. “Did you have some plan in mind if he went back and got the dog? You know what a dog like that could’ve done to Kimi?” He added as an afterthought, “Or you?”
“But he wouldn’t have. That’s the other thing I confirmed, besides Jackie’s story. Look, if Brenner’d been going to retaliate against someone, he’d have done it with Patterson, wouldn’t he? The second Patterson punched him, he’d have punched him right back, and he didn’t.”
“Nothing happened to Patterson, he’s in great shape, so nothing’s going to happen to you, either. Is that it?”
“Yes,” I said. “Appearances to the contrary. What was he going to do? Slug me? Sic his dog on me? No, and for the same reason he didn’t punch Patterson or get the dog, which is that he couldn’t afford the bad publicity. Look, if Brenner had kicked the shit out of Patterson, what would’ve happened? The first thing is that it would’ve ended up in all the papers. Patterson’d probably have pressed charges, and it could’ve ended up in court. And you know what? You can bet Patterson would’ve really played it up, first of all, because he dramatized stuff anyway,
and, second of all, because he’d’ve been glad to see Brenner exposed, and Brenner probably knew it. And me? His showpiece dog mauls a client? Or a client’s dog? Yeah, sure, I was scared. Who wouldn’t be? But so what? And so what if it’s just his pride that’s hurt? Other people must’ve called him on things before, and it hasn’t hurt his business.”
“Sure,” Steve said. “All he did was get kicked in the balls. Twice. But, hey, he’s the only guy in the world that didn’t give a damn.”
“You’re wrong,” I said. “Because, look, you of all people ought to know that when they don’t descend, they can be a lot of places, or they can not be there at all, right? So Brenner’s are in a really weird place, which is a safe deposit box at the bank. So if you really want to kick him where it hurts, that’s what you go for. Jackie Miner didn’t exactly stroke his macho image, and what about whoever owns that Clumber spaniel? The people I told you about who bought the dog from the Metcalfs. They’re the ones who told Oscar Patterson about Brenner. It was their dog that made Patterson go after Brenner in the first place. So presumably they didn’t exactly tell Brenner they were thrilled with him, either, and nothing’s happened to them, at least as far as I know.”
“He wouldn’t just take it,” Steve said.
“He didn’t. Or I don’t think he did. He acted out of self-interest. He did what he had to do to avoid bad publicity. If he’d put on a John Wayne act, all it would’ve done would be to cost him a lot of money, maybe even ruined his business. Stringing dogs up and the other stuff doesn’t hurt his business because most owners who go to him don’t know any better. But hurting a person would hurt him. So he didn’t do
it. Besides, not everyone feels compelled to be John Wayne, and if you don’t believe me—”
It isn’t polite to point at people, no matter how silly they look, so I nodded my head. Right in the middle of the paved area in the dead center of Brattle Square, right there in public where everyone could see them, six or eight grown men were leaping and thudding around. They wore stupid costumes and had bells on their ankles. They seemed to be having fun. I tried to imagine going to bed with a morris dancer. Would he take off his bells? Leave them on and let them jingle?
“Hey, Steve,” I said. “You know how your mother’s always telling you that you need a hobby? All you do is work all the time, and what are you going to do when you retire? Well—”
“Jesus Christ,” he said.
“Gotcha,” I said. “You see? And when you get to know them, they’re probably okay. Actually, they look pretty tough. In fact, at Red Rover—”
“Holly, enough,” he said. “No one who practices veterinary medicine in this crazy place needs this lecture.”
“I wasn’t lecturing. I was demonstrating, right? Morris dancing is all men, you know, and from their point of view, it’s probably very macho. It happens to be Ye Olde English Macho, and you’d just as soon pirouette around in a tutu, but they don’t care. It’s probably what they like about it. And with Brenner, if you ask me, macho is that big, impressive place and the shepherd putting on the vicious dog act. It’s probably other things, too. Expensive cars or something. Anyway, I think it’s mostly the dog. You could teach India to do that, right?”
“Yeah, but—”
“So why don’t you? Because if someone punches you in the jaw, you punch back. Or maybe you don’t, but you know you could.”
“I’m not so sure it’s such an either-or situation.” Steve shook his head. “As a matter of fact, a lot of the time, it isn’t. If a guy’s got a guard dog, it doesn’t automatically mean he hasn’t got a gun, too.”
“So maybe the general principle is wrong, but I still think it’s true about Brenner. You know what it is? The hype. The sales pitch. The barking dog? You just don’t get the feeling that there’s a lot of punch behind it. I humiliated him, you know, and he just watched me walk out of there. Why not? I’d paid, and cash, too.”