Black Ribbon (30 page)

“In line for …?”

“He wants to be president of the AKC.”

“That’s ridiculous,” I said.

“That’s what Buck thinks, too.”

“Well, Buck is right,” I said.

But after I hung up, while I was charging down the steps of the lodge on my way to my cabin to change for dinner, I almost collided with Don Abbott, who said heartily, “Well, you’re full of energy, aren’t you? Good for you! Go get dressed, and come back up and enjoy yourself. I always say: You can’t keep dog people down for long.”

It was, of course, exactly what someone had done to Eva Spitteler.

IF I’D BEEN THE POLICE, I’d have questioned everyone. I, for example, had a lot to say.

So what else is new?

Truly. If properly interrogated, I’d have told all.
(Nice dog you got there, lady. Be a shame to separate the two of you.)
But according to the rumors that spread from table to table at dinner that night, instead of making interesting and productive use of my loyalty by frightening me into revealing the secrets of the Order, the police had frittered away their time extracting dull facts about the A-frame from people who didn’t even try to keep them secret. No one came right out and said that the police should’ve talked to me, of course; that’s just my own conclusion. But according to gossip, the police had concentrated on Heather and Sara, who owned the A-frame; on Everett Dow, who’d built it; and on the proprietor of the hardware store where Everett had bought the hinges and chains. For information about Waggin’ Tail, they’d turned to Maxine. Neglected, I was thus virtually forced to keep my knowledge of the grips, signs, and passwords all to
myself. I don’t blame the police. From the unenlightened perspective of their own fraternal order, they were following what must have seemed like the sensible course of posing questions about Eva’s death to people who might have been expected to know the answers.

Having been seated among the elect on the previous evening, I was hoping to demote myself back to my own level, but Maxine McGuire snagged me, and I got stuck at her table again. Heather and Sara had escaped to a far corner of the dining room, but as on the previous night, Cam and Ginny were at Max’s table, as were Don and Phyllis Abbott and Eric Grimaldi. Everyone but Phyllis was drinking pretty heavily, it seemed to me, and I’m not exactly a teetotaler. In the places previously occupied by the agility people were Craig and Joy, who were undergoing what I took to be the first steps in an initiation into the fancy.

“Craig’s been bitten by the bug,” Don Abbott informed me in a Scotch-thick voice smoothed by the burgundy he was pouring down. “He’s been asking about where he can get a show dog.”

Joy giggled.
Giggled.
“And what to do once we get it,” she added in the tone of someone who deludes herself into believing she’s uttered an exceptionally clever remark.

Craig, who apparently shared the delusion, gave her a protective hug. He squeezed her lightly, as if she were a fragile puppy unable to withstand a solid grown-up thump. What made me uncomfortable about the two of them, I realized, wasn’t just Joy’s stereotypical ultrafeminine, helpless, vulnerable, and infantile manner, or even the possibility that some misguided individual might misuse her as a basis for making assumptions about me or about other women. No, that was just the least of it. What really bothered me wasn’t Joy alone, but the couple, Joy and Craig in combination, because taken together, Joy so little-girlish, Craig so unnaturally overmuscled, the two of them, despite the clean, wholesome appearance
of the individuals, somehow exuded an air of child molestation: victim and perpetrator, wife and husband. I wondered whether Joy could possibly have remained a virgin bride.

Don, Phyllis, and Eric gave no sign of entertaining such speculations. Tactfully avoiding any reference to Lucky’s deficiencies as a show dog, Eric offered numerous helpful recommendations about getting started in dogs. Go to a show, he suggested. And read Don Abbott’s terrific book! Stretching a point, Don asked whether they were thinking of another Cairn. Yes, they were. Well, Don would be happy to get the names of reputable breeders in their area. Showing dogs was really a lot of fun, Phyllis said. Among other things, you got to meet wonderful people; you made friends for life.

Meanwhile, Maxine was expressing considerable annoyance at Wayne Varney, who, she said, could have dealt with the whole matter very competently himself. She’d never before suspected Wayne of suffering from such low self-esteem. And why on earth did they need an autopsy? When she lost a dog for no known reason, she always had one performed, but this was different. Plainly speaking, Eva had gotten conked on the head. What more obvious cause of death could there be?

Paying no attention to the content of Maxine’s complaints, Ginny spoke almost exclusively about Bingo: good lines, sire finished, dam pointed, eyes and hips clear on both sides, lovely temperaments, and on and on in the eternal manner of dog breeders. Cam listened patiently. What could she possibly have replied?

Except to insert food, I kept my mouth shut. The clam chowder was Cape Cod style, a white sauce with chopped quahogs, not Maine clam chowder, which has a relatively thin but strong-tasting broth and swims with whole steamers, bellies, chewy necks, and all, delicious, but not to the squeamish, I suppose. The main course, seafood lasagna, wasn’t bad, and
I’d drenched my salad in Ranch. Dessert was bread pudding. A white meal.

After I’d eaten, I got a cup of coffee, and instead of downing it and excusing myself, I sat there as the passive observer of a ritual at which I’d often officiated. The liturgical phrases and sentences were ones I’d recited myself. Whole paragraphs had passed my own lips. Don’s advice to Craig was my own, as were Eric’s injunctions, and, most of all, Phyllis’s enthusiasm. Time and again, in welcoming newcomers to the fancy, I’d offered the same grand incentives: the promise that shows were
such
fun and that dog people were
so
wonderful.

Our table dispersed when Don Abbott asked whether he could interest anyone in a cognac and no one but Eric accepted the suggestion. Craig, I felt sure, wanted to join the other men, but succumbed to the batting of Joy’s tired, imploring eyes. He escorted her away with the genuinely reluctant but duty-first, no-choice, you-understand air of a parent forsaking a good party to get the baby-sitter home. As Ginny rose from her seat, the thought crossed my mind that for once, she looked her age. Then I realized that I had no idea what it actually was. Her skin was suddenly more wrinkled than weathered, and loose hairs were making their escape from what had always been the tight-security lockup of that narrow plait. Although Phyllis pleaded fatigue, her wide, glossy eyes and the tension in her jaw and hands predicted a choice between pills and insomnia. Maxine looked damp and overheated: Artificial-looking pink blotches burned on her cheeks, and the veins around her nose blazed red. In contrast to the rest of us, Cam looked neat, tidy, and precisely as sleepy as a healthy person should be at bedtime. In the lakeside humidity and the lingering warmth of the unseasonably hot day, everyone else’s hair had broken out in everything from unexpected little crimps and waves to Orphan Annie mops to what looked like the kinds of bizarrely dual-purpose items advertised on late-night TV—voluminously pilose wigs that had
only to be whisked off the head and lightly damped to serve as restaurant-size scouring pads guaranteed to remove even baked-on grease from commercial cookware. And I’m not just the president of the Hair Club for Pots! I’m also …

But Cam didn’t believe in gimmicks. What she believed in was obedience. I imagined her standing in front of the bathroom mirror, where she’d command the full attention of her short, dark hair (“Ready! Watch me!”) and go on to issue the same commands she gave to her dogs, and in some of the exact same words, too: Down! Stay! And stay down it did, in neat rows of controlled waves, until Cam released it. Or possibly she never did. For some people, no exercise is ever really finished.

So when I left the main lodge, Eric Grimaldi and Don Abbott were heading across the lobby to the little bar known as The Pub for what Eric had insisted was going to be one quick nightcap; and Joy and Craig were presumably in their cabin, where, I imagined, he was zipping her into or possibly out of a fuzzy pink bunny-sleeper. Since Cam, Ginny, Phyllis, and I were going in the same direction, we walked together. Phyllis, as I recall, did all the talking: Wasn’t it exciting to encourage newcomers to get involved! Joy and Craig were people with a lot to contribute. Didn’t we agree? Instead of waiting to hear whether we did, Phyllis switched to exclamations about the brightness of the stars and the beauty of the moon on the lake. I slapped at a mosquito and said nothing. When we reached Cam and Ginny’s cabin, Phyllis said her good nights in exactly the same gracious tone she used in the ring, as if she were ordering them to prepare not their dogs, but themselves, for the long down. I’d always found Phyllis very pleasant in the ring—friendly, considerate, and fair. Judicial, too, of course. After all, she was a judge.

As Phyllis and I covered the short distance to our cabin, she remarked on what a trooper Ginny was. “You know, it’s not every breeder who’d take full responsibility for that dog,”
Phyllis said. “Some people out there would decide they didn’t like the impression people were getting of their lines, and they’d put him down. But not Ginny. I admire her spirit. I hope she’s not setting herself up for disappointment.”

I said I hoped so, too. Starting up my own stairs, I wished Phyllis good night. She told me to sleep well.

But every diligent dog owner is a sort of Robert Frost—dogs to walk before we sleep, dogs to walk before we sleep. Speaking of which, you know this book by Elizabeth Marshall Thomas?
The Hidden Life of Dogs.
That one. It’s what I thought of as I walked Rowdy that night … or, pardon me, as I systematically applied my observational skills to his behavior in my trillionth effort to fathom how any sensate human being could ever have discerned anything even remotely discreet, reserved, or modest, never mind clandestine, disguised, covert, masked, obscured, kept under wraps, or otherwise
HIDDEN
, for heaven’s sake, about the desire of a male dog to leave his mark as ostentatiously as possible on absolutely every object in the vicinity of which he could possibly cock a leg. In truth, it’s a sad book, the pitiful story of a woman so terrified of a normal, protective human relationship with dogs that she fled the responsibility and mutuality that love entails.

But there’s one phrase in the book that I adore: “pitiless domestication.” You know what that means? The breeding of show dogs. Almost everyone else in the fancy loathed the book, you know. I’m unusual. Anyway, with my product of pitiless domestication oppressively reduced to an unnatural and abnormal condition, which is to say, with Rowdy safely hitched to his flex lead and thus, worse yet, linked to his devoted oppressor, I started out along the bank of the lake away from the main lodge. When we reached the thick woods, the path ended, and we reversed direction, strolled past the dock, the pebble beach, the upended canoes, the lodge itself, and the cabins on its far side. Circling around in back, we skirted the edge of the big field, passing the area where Eric
had held the breed handling class. Here and there in the field and among the trees that formed its boundaries, dark shapes loomed and stirred: other people, other dogs. Restless, I considered crossing the field to the blacktop drive and following it through the high pines and thick undergrowth out to the main highway. What kept me away from the dirt road to the agility area was not, I conclude in retrospect, some superstitious fear that Eva’s avenging revenant lurked among the colorful obstacles, passed through them perhaps, invisibly seesawed back and forth on the teeter-totter, whooshed through the weave poles, cleared the jumps, or lingered on the pause table gathering strength to spring off, brutally dismember the innocent pieces of equipment, and—brandishing planks, poles, metal bases, thick wooden supports, and heavy chains in its phantasmagoric hands—vent the rage of the newly dead on any hapless intruder who had the ill luck to stroll by. Not at all. I didn’t fear the living, either: I was no threat to anyone. Besides, despite Elizabeth Marshall Thomas’s fancy academic credentials—gee whiz, a Ph.D. in anthropomorphism—the real expert on dogs was Carol Lea Benjamin: Rowdy’s heritage of pitiless domestication had, if anything, brightened the big red S on his show-dog chest, and I was his very own Lois Lane. So what stayed my steps? Not the dead, not the living, but what I now identify as true panic: the primitive, universal terror of the great god Pan. At the time, though, all I felt was a muted, civilized disinclination to approach the thick woods.

“Rowdy, this way!” I called softly. “Let’s go!” I had to reel in his lead. Pan was Greek, a god of trees and shepherds. Rowdy’s original people spoke Mahlemut. On the treeless tundra, they kept no sheep. Survival itself was their only luxury. They could not indulge in pointless foreign gods.

“Rowdy, this way!”