Dog House (16 page)

Millard and I and the wonderful John Dunleavy, a burly, green-thumbed Irishman who helped us with the heavy gardening (in his spare time, he chaired the Saint Patrick's Day Parade), had, over the years, subdued the grass leading down to the water. As our own, personal sward became prettier and smoother and freer of those open spots of sewage dating from the days when—yuck—all our toilets flushed directly into the harbor, it attracted Canada geese.

There is a large population of Canada geese in the Northeast that has never learned how to migrate, so each fall and spring, we'd find forty or fifty on our lawn, eating and pooping en masse. If you haven't had firsthand experience with geese and you think they're gorgeous, let me just tell you: They're dumb. Maybe all birds are dumb—even parrots. But there's no bird as stupid as the Canada goose. All alone, it justifies the extinction of its pterodactylic forebears.

After trying to run them off with the usual remedies like plastic owls and plastic snakes and evil-tasting and wildly expensive lawn sprays (oops—geese have no sense of taste) and chasing them and flapping an imaginary apron and yelling “Shoo,” (which gets them shuffling a good foot and a half closer to the water), we fell back on our second line of defense: gimmicks. Millard had an old bullwhip, for instance, and was (sexily) adept at snapping it over their heads. Surprisingly, the crack of the sound barrier being broken scared the very stupid birds—have I mentioned they're stupid?—into gabbling excitedly and bunching up and moving a good three feet closer to the water. Trouble was, you had to walk down on the lawn to perform this singular feat effectively, and there—as I've mentioned—was lots of poop on the lawn; plus, while I practiced in secret, I wasn't, in truth, very good. So if Millard wasn't home, I was reduced to the plain old-fashioned “shoo.” That's why I tried the remote-controlled toy car.

Shiny red and black with lightning bolts on its sides and a generous encrustation of plastic chrome, it was a thing of tacky beauty. With its neat remote, I intended, from the porch or even from the house, to guide that mean little robot right into our resident flock and drive it—the way cowboys drive herds, sort of—into moving on. Maybe moving away, even, because the geese seemed impressed. Or at least, they did their gabbling and bunching and shuffling thing as, on its trial runs, the car-flashing its lights and whirring insanely—zoomed toward them. This was encouraging enough that I dreamily allowed myself the vision of sitting with an iced drink while unerringly guiding my private missile toward enemy hostiles. Sort of like Cape Canaveral. Except that I'd stopped smoking, and the car, regrettably, wouldn't blow up. Equally regrettably, my missile kept getting hung up on things like tufts of persistent dandelion and the fresher clumps of poop, and ultimately, I had to relegate it to a high shelf in the workshop; graveyard of my/our failed ideas.

So at last it came to that moment when Millard and I, having tried all options short of firing off a cannon (which we'd heard was working well at local golf courses but didn't seem quite neighborly), fell back once more, regrouped, and our eye fell speculatively on Juno.

There she was, circling, leaping, trotting, pacing and basically needing to do something useful. Needing, in fact, to herd. Would she herd
anything,
we wondered, or just us? We took Juno out to the water side of the house and pointed her toward the geese. And well, to say she'd been born to chase would be an effmg understatement. She LOVED chasing geese! I had merely to open the front door and whisper,
go!
and Juno would hurl herself down the stairs, race flat out across the grass and be among them, barking. Dumb as they were—have I said they were dumb?-in some dim, reptilian part of their tiny brains, they recognized our girl as the hairy threat she certainly was, and in a great flap of wings, with incensed, excited honks, they'd lift off, as one, for greener, safer shores.

I haven't mentioned that at the end of the lawn, where our bulkhead dwindled away, there was a little beachy stretch scattered with sharp stones and horseshoe crab shells and snotty strings of seaweed. One afternoon, as I sent my avenging angel off to work, the goose flock, instead of taking off for some less risky toilet, decided just to fly into the water twenty feet or so offshore, where it settled down gracefully to float and nonchalantly preen itself until the nuisance went away. Juno, revved up, heedless and possibly running too fast to stop, hurtled toward the beach and splashed in after them.

Shit! I hadn't even known she could swim!

But not only could she swim, she was a Flipper in fur. It took only seconds for her to paddle out and create minor havoc among those astonished, imbecile geese which—Just as they did on land—swam two feet away and honked. With Juno hot on their tails.

Then somehow, her overexcited eye fell on a flock of mallards even farther from shore, and hey, something new to herd. She shifted objectives. She was close to a third of the way across the harbor when I began to panic.

“Juno! Juno! Come, Juno! Come, Juno!”

“Come on, good girl! Come ! ”

Juno didn't come.

 

 

One chilly late fall day, just months after we'd first moved in, we'd watched a yellow Lab and her pup paddle past our house and head determinedly down the harbor—our brackish harbor, with its strong currents and eight-foot tides. Millard and I were on our knees in the garden, but we thought we recognized those dogs; they lived with a neighboring duck hunter, perhaps a half mile away. What the older dog didn't see, but we did, was that her pup was tiring and falling behind. The autumnal water was icy and the two were swimming against the current. Even as we watched, the smaller dog paddled a few strokes and stopped, struggled to keep its head above water. It did, at last, but the effort cost it, and it was falling farther and farther behind. It was a game little pup, but it was failing.

We realized, just then, that the tide seemed to be carrying the two closer to our shore, and Millard and I tore down to the beach to try to drag them in before the puppy drowned. The bigger Lab, when we finally got to her, was wretched and shivering, but the little one was still, its tongue lolling out. Bundling both of them in blankets, we drove them to their home and later, much later, phoned their owner, afraid to hear. The pup hadn't died. But it had been close.

 

 

So I watched aghast as Juno moved purposefully into the current, herding a flock that now seemed to be moving inexorably away from our shore. Damn it, why didn't they fly? And how strong a swimmer
was
our Juno. Who'd never been wet before? I was in the midst of stripping off my shoes, socks and jacket to go in after her when I remembered what a substandard swimmer I am and, forgetting my shoes, turned to run for help. And then ... as in that classic
New Yorkermath
cartoon ... A Miracle Occurred.

Remember the sheepherding thing?

Well, somehow, even as she was paddling away, Juno was keeping an eye on the shore, and having spotted a far more important sheep getting away (me, running toward the house in nightmare-like slow motion), she turned from the ducks and began to paddle back to the beach to catch me. Bounding up the shingle and across the grass and shaking off the freezing salt water, she dashed into my arms.

So that was the end of goose duty or of any practical employment for hyper Juno other than to show people how nicely she could barely “sit” (never, ever “stay”) and what a superstar she was at going up for a Frisbee.

Surprisingly, it was the nineties already, and surprisingly, we'd begun to earn more money. In honor of our newfound almost-wealth, and because I'd never been one to allow money to sit around, let alone pile up and turn into more money, I decided, among several other less defensible indulgences, to have my groceries delivered. I found a way to rationalize this luxury by telling my friends it was a lot cheaper than going to the supermarket. Cheaper, because let loose among aisles stocked with gorgeously colored boxes, shiny bottles and slithery packets all chirping “New” and “Improved” and “Drink Me,” and given some even moderately inoffensive supermarket music and a little air-conditioning, I could be counted on to bring home a couple of just about everything. In olden times, before supermarkets, I often had my groceries delivered because each food category came from a separate store: the butcher store, the grocery store, the bakery; plus, milk was delivered daily. At your back door. In bottles. So if you found yourself stuck at home in a third-floor apartment in a Boston suburb with a toddler and no car, you called up the butcher and the baker and ordered. On the one hand, the butcher and the baker knew you by sight and knew what grind of hamburger or type of fruit pie you liked, so you didn't really
have
to go. On the other hand, a toddler could be so numbingly boring that now and then, you just had to get out of the house.

This looks like I'm wandering, I know, but it's all leading up to Jimmy Cagney.

 

 

A new supermarket delivery man—his name was Eddie—appeared at my front door one morning. At the sound of the bell, Emma and Juno, barking the alarm, raced to see who would be first to get to the door, to the porch, to the stranger, to widdle on his shoes. It could get really hairy in those first few moments as I struggled not to open the door wide enough for them to burst through and leap upon whomever had rung while trying simultaneously to maneuver the smaller parcels into the house through the crack, smiling like crazy all the while so as not to seem like some cartoon of a suspicious, mad-dog-owning homeowner. Of course in not opening that door, I was being careful, too, because I know there are people who are afraid of dogs. For such unenlightened souls, I'd hung a small bronze plaque above the bell. “Beware of the dogs,” it cautioned. In Latin. (There's a dangerous charm to living on the edge of lawsuits.)

Eddie, however, was almost as happy to see my pups as they were to see him and invited them out onto the porch where he rubbed their heads briskly, the way men do.

“I love dogs,” he said, handing me my bags while Juno and Emma frantically inhaled his pants. “My wife breeds dogs.”

“Oh (that explained the pants), really?” I said, politely, semi-interested. “What kind?”

“Jack Russells,” Eddie replied. “Know what they are?”

“Do I know what they are? I've owned three.”

“No kidding? We just had a litter. Want to see a picture?” asked Satan.

And that's how Jimmy Cagney—essence and distillate of Jack—came into our lives. Tiny, rollicking, nippy, tough, barky, demanding and, oh, boy, cute, Jimmy was the embodiment of Irish-ness. And why we hired Norah. Or to be completely honest,
part
of why we hired Norah. The rest of the story was, well ... I was beginning to get a little creaky. I no longer worked outdoors when the thermometer dropped below fifty, and I'd told Millard very firmly that I didn't want to carry any more furniture up the stairs while walking backward. Forward, though, was still okay. Our house was magically growing larger and larger, however, and somehow (well, of course I knew how) it was accruing much too much in the way of dustable stuff: furniture, porcelain tidbits, taxidermed birds, tiny boxes, pictures, immovable marbles and general junk. Plus, I was writing all the time. I needed household help.