Bad Dog (19 page)

Like when you and Mom are together?

“Don’t go there.”

That’s my favorite time
, she seems to say.
I love that
.

“I know, honey.”

When’s she coming back?

“Can I get an Our Father and a couple Hail Marys, please?”

Our church looks like a Romanesque cathedral and was built in the late nineteenth century. It has a cavernous rectangular interior like a hangar for a blessed blimp, a Stanford White altar in the back with carved stone idols, and an ornate wooden shelf of pipes that slit open and closed as the Gothic organ sings. Apses and side altars are filigreed and baroque, and the overall effect of the space always feels to me like being in an empty football field at the beginning of the day at the tail end of winter.

Even when it’s filled, it’s full of open space. It has a thriving congregation of tourists and regulars, and the 10 a.m. Mass with the choir is the highlight of my week. The most beautiful cantors on earth sing like sun falling on a mountain.

Amid a din of barking and yowls, Father Gil leads us all through the St. Francis Prayer and a brief poetic homily:

Normally, Father Gil is not drawn to heightened language. His homilies tend to be brief, deeply felt, and pragmatic. Taking notes is not required.

But the yelps and the meows, the woman holding up the ashes of her dead dog, so rawly that I feel like they’re still warm from the fire, and the absurdity of a stuffed-animal family being held aloft
for blessing by a kid barely old enough to think—all this inspires him.

Then he comes around with the wet scepter and sprinkles the pets. Pushing through the crowd, getting each one with a generous aim.

He kisses the urn.

“Well,” he says coming up to Hola. “That’s a big boy there.”

“She’s a girl, Father.”

“What a beauty.”

“Thank you, Father,” I say. “She’s new to the faith.”

“Good for her.”

Hola gets a double dose of holy water.

She stands still for a moment, puzzled, as though she’s about to remember that she hates water but doesn’t.

Hola prays before her blessing
.

T
HE DAY BEFORE
the Meet the Breeds event, I decide the best way to prepare Hola is to wear her out physically so she’ll be too tired to do anything in the chaos but sit quietly for petting.

That’s my theory, anyway.

Even on our best days together, when I imagine I see progress, I still feel like Susan Conant’s Holly Winter, who said of one of her malamutes that he “doesn’t necessarily do anything more than take my opinions under advisement.”

So I saddle her up and walk her north to the New York–Presbyterian Hospital campus, around the Neurological Institute, where clearly I should have been a patient, past all the alarmingly young future health care providers in their day-old scrubs.

And on the way back I’m refreshing our dominance training when I hear a little
snap!

She looks startled a moment, then she’s fine, sniffing the mounds of garbage we laughingly call a sidewalk on 159th Street.

But she’s limping.

Her right front paw can barely hold any of her weight at all, like when she gets salt in one of her paws in the winter—which happens all the time in Manhattan—and she cannot put any pressure on it until I extract the crystals from between her toes.

I check but can’t see anything stuck in her foot. We limp home and I disinfect the paw, but there is no visible contusion, lesion, puncture, or rash.

Leaving me to face the fact: I broke my dog’s foot.

She doesn’t get to go to Meet the Breeds—and it isn’t even her fault.

Ruby cuts into the sound of my blood coming to a gel by hopping onto the doggie bed cushion next to Hola and kneading it with her paws like a miniature pastry chef wearing little white gloves.

While I am waiting in Midtown at the doggie ER for the vet to return with the verdict, I call Gloria to tell her she doesn’t need to come in for the big dog show after all.

“You’re working her too hard,” she says. “Why are you doing this to her?”

“It’s not that serious.”

“You broke the dog’s paw, Marty. That’s serious.”

“We don’t know if it’s—”

“I’m getting an idea what your childhood was like.”

“What?”

“It’s a pretty dark world,” she says. “You’re pushing her to get this stupid certificate, but it doesn’t mean anything. It’s not good for her; it’s not good for you. You’re not listening to her. She’ll do anything to make you happy, you know, she’ll … she’ll …”

“Are you crying? Don’t cry, Gloria. Come on.” I am pleading now, feeling like I’ve done something even more terrible than the terrible thing I have, in fact, done.

She sniffs a couple times, blows her nose over the line.

“Look,” she says, “be careful with Hola. Okay?”

“I promise. I love Hola.”

“I know you do.”

“I’m sorry, hon.”

“I know.”

The ER vet tells me that her paw is not broken, just sprained, and that there isn’t really anything I can do for her.

“Just take it easy,” she says. “Let her rest.”

“I know,” I say. “One day at a time.”

Meet the Breeds is held in the Jacob Javits Center, a convention behemoth beside the Hudson River on the far West Side of Manhattan, just south of Midtown. A concrete monolith that seems like nothing so much as a monument to the Mob. There are clotted lines for tickets and coat check, and people are not allowed to bring their own dogs, an inspired idea. Inside are booths pushing pet food and dog jewelry, portable crates and obedience clubs. And there is a show ring the size of a baseball infield surrounded by risers and folding chairs four or five rows deep for the major demonstrations—agility, carting, police dogs, flyball, and obedience.

At the back wall there are more than one hundred live displays devoted to almost every breed the AKC recognizes, placed in alphabetical order. I imagine the logistical nightmare involved—some of these breeds are almost comically rare. Yes, there are Labs and Yorkies and shepherds, but there are also xolos and pharaoh hounds. Some of the reps I talk to drove all the way from the West Coast to be here. Almost every breed of dog is included, except, it turns out, the golden retriever, whose booth sits oddly dark.

The forty or so cat breeds are sequestered in a smaller bull pen to the north. Their area is entirely less energetic and popular. Most dog people agree with Holly Winter: “
Dog
spelled backward? Yes. But cat? Tac? I didn’t see the cosmic significance.”

I would feel sorry for the cats except that, when I visit them later in the day, out of pity, they seem absolutely overwhelmed by indifference. Most of them, in fact, are asleep. I get the impression they find this event altogether too people pleasing for their taste.

Which is why we love cats.

In addition to stopping by my friend Lilian’s Bernese mountain dog booth, I am hoping to get a consultation with the well-known animal behaviorist, operant-conditioning expert, and author Mary Burch. She is the head of the AKC’s Canine Good Citizen program and its official public face: I’d seen a clip of her on the
Today
show talking about how, well, every dog can be one.

In other words, lying.

She seemed like a gracious southern woman, and I knew she was about to publish a book called
Citizen Canine
, the first comprehensive guide to the CGC program since Jack and Wendy Volhard’s ten-year-old effort.

I locate her giving the test as a demo in a small ring placed awkwardly in the middle of a walkway among the vendor booths, pushed up against a concession stand dispensing giant pretzels.

There is a line of people waiting to be tested. Mary is a commanding, stylish woman with a clipboard. Rather more made-up, highlighted, perm-waved, and basically more put together than your typical dog woman, who seems to think high fashion is anything without a urine stain.

The dogs are suspiciously adept—sailing through the requirements. One woman pops out a treat and is immediately expelled. But other than that, the canine manners on display are excellent. My spirits sink faster than a mastiff in a mudslide until I discover the reason: these are all trained demo dogs. They already have their CGC.

After watching awhile, I leave and push my way through the crowd to the Bernese mountain dog display. It is decorated with a Swiss flag and some prints of generic Alpine scenes. A small space for such big dogs, with two crates and a pen, each of which holds a grinning, calm Berner. A couple of Lilian’s friends are here, including a skinny guy with a perm whose dog is attached to a traditional Swiss milk cart.

Throngs of people pressing in, crowding. Their arms out. Asking if these dogs shed a lot, how long they live, whether they are particularly well-behaved.

Now, if these are your criteria, I can save you a trip to the kennel: don’t get a Bernese mountain dog. They shed all the time, so much so that dog hair will eventually become a quilt on top of your furniture. They live maybe eight or nine years, if you’re lucky. And if you’ve been paying attention, you’ll know exactly what they’re like to train.

But, yowza, are they popular.

“Is Hola feeling any better?” Lilian asks me.

“She’s resting.”

“Can you bring her tomorrow?”

Visions of Hola hopping onto old ladies and jabbing at them lovingly with her good front paw. A scream rings out. A stampede of spooked, snarling purebreds.

“Well,” I say, “I’m not sure about her paw.”

Something about Lilian—so open-faced, such a bringer of four-legged life—I didn’t want to mislead her, not exactly.

“She gets very anxious,” I add in the understatement of the month.

Lilian’s friend Debbie, who I like immediately, hears something in my voice and performs a rescue operation:

“Don’t worry about it,” she says. “Listen to the dog.”

• • •

By the time I get back to the CGC mini-ring, the demos are over. I spend some time wandering around, and, as so often happens, it is at the moment when I’ve given up on casually running into Mary Burch that I do, in fact, casually run into her.

On my way out the door, I take a brief stop at a table of dog-training books from the BowTie Press. And when I look up, there she is, standing beside me.

So I introduce myself and say, “I was watching your demonstration earlier.”

“Oh, yes.” As in:
You’re the freak who was stalking my ring
.

“I wanted to say hi,” I say.

“Hi.” And
buh bye
.

She throws me a bone: “Are you enjoying the event today?”

“It’s very successful,” I say. “I was over at the Bernese mountain dog booth this afternoon; there were hundreds of people. I have a Berner myself.”

She smiles. “That’s what Berners do to people.”

“We’re trying to get the CGC. It’s been very hard for us.”

“Why?”

“Mostly it’s item ten, ‘Supervised separation.’ We’re struggling with—”

“How are you training it?”

“You can train it?” I say. “I thought—”

“Of course you can. Here’s what you do. You should—”

Just then, some asshole wearing a black BowTie Press baseball cap leans over the book table and says, “Mary, you have a second?”

“Excuse me,” she says, turning away from me just as I’m about to learn the secret.

• • •

I
LOOK OVER
at the main obedience ring and see a lanky black Lab being led in by a beautiful, athletic woman with radioactive highlights and a fake-baked face that is as serious as an astronaut’s. Without quite realizing it, I’m drawn physically to ringside in time to witness something I will never forget all the days of my life.

“Welcome,” booms the PA, “Petra Ford and Tyler. They were the winners of the National Obedience Invitational last year and are going to Long Beach next month to defend their title.”

Later, I find out that Petra is the Cindy Crawford of dog trainers, a former competitive cyclist who has handled her incredible Lab Tyler to the very top ranks of competitive canine obedience. Her upper body is remarkably still, and she has no expression at all as she touches her left hand to her abdomen and says something inaudible, bringing Tyler into perfect heel position at her side.

The emcee explains that in March, Petra and Tyler will be going to compete with the U.S. team at the canine world championships at Crufts in England.

“That’s why Petra is not smiling,” says the emcee. “Any kind of expression can be considered a double cue in the English system—a facial expression on top of a hand signal could be giving the dog two different ways to get what the handler wants. Only one cue’s allowed.”