Little Boy Blue (5 page)

“I’m not sure,” I said, “but all of the veterinarians listed in this paperwork told me they never did any ringworm tests.”

Dr. Milne sighed and made a face that I hadn’t seen since about 1978, when my father had caught me hurling Star Wars action figures from the bathtub into the toilet.

“All right, then, here’s what we’re going to do,” Dr. Milne said. “We don’t actually know that this dog had ringworm. Since you and your other dog have already been exposed, as long as Blue stays in your house and yard, he can’t infect anybody else. Notify everybody who’s touched him, and have them watch for any signs of abnormalities, especially on that baby. We’ll do the ringworm culture today and keep him in quarantine with you for the next two weeks, just to be safe. When you hear back from this woman Annie Turner, call my office and give me all the details you can get. In the meantime, we’ll give you a bottle of medicinal shampoo that should kill any fungus that Blue might still have, plus a tube of cream that will help to heal his scabs.”

I scooped up Blue and paid my bill, which listed the cost of the shampoo and cream at a combined total of $38.75.

All of this drama over something that costs less than forty bucks
to correct?
I thought.
I paid $400 for this dog. Why on earth would
people charging that kind of money not have just given Blue these
things before putting him up for adoption?

Back at home, I got in touch with the folks from Lulu’s Rescue. They were horrified to learn of my experience. They said it was the first time they had ever had a problem with a dog from this particular rescue group in North Carolina, and they’d been given no indication that Blue was anything other than a happy, healthy puppy. The photograph of him hadn’t shown any signs of a skin problem, and nobody had ever said the word
ringworm
in their discussions about him. They promised to do further research and let me know if they could find any additional information about Blue’s past, and they thanked me for all I was doing to make sure he was healthy. Some people, they told me, would have skipped the shampoo and instead just sent him back, rejected as defective.

It took me a good while to get that repugnant idea out of my mind. I shook my head at the very thought of it, and I spent the rest of the afternoon following Dr. Milne’s instructions. Blue seemed oblivious to all the concern and drama, what with his nap at the vet’s office having recharged his puppy batteries. He scampered and played with Stella until I picked him up in one hand with the bottle of shampoo in the other.

Not long after I’d finished Blue’s first medicinal bath in the kitchen sink, my telephone rang. The woman on the line said she was Annie Turner, returning my call.

At least I thought “Annie Turner” was the name the woman had said. She sounded about as different from me as a platypus from a mountain lion. I was born and raised in New Jersey. Unless I make a serious mental effort, I talk as fast as a freight train and sound just as silly as Snooki or Tony Soprano thanks to my “Joisey Gurl” accent. This woman Annie Turner had a Southern drawl and talked slower than a push mower on a hot summer’s day. At first, we couldn’t understand a thing that the other was saying. I asked her to repeat a couple of things a couple of times, until I could discern her pattern of speech. I slowed my own sentences and tried to enunciate the way I do when I’m on assignment as a travel writer in foreign countries.

Turner said she had fostered Blue at the farm where she lived after he was found at the local animal-control center in Person County. “They gas puppies like him to death,” she said. “They kill 92 percent of all the dogs that go in there.”

I paused for a moment, trying to digest what she’d just told me.

“I’m sorry,” I said, shocked into responding even more slowly. “Would … you … please … say that again?”

“Ninety-two percent,” she said. “They kill almost all of them. We pulled him out at the last minute. He was headed for the gas chamber.”

Blue, at that moment, was on my backyard deck. He’d gone outside to dry off, and I’d given him a bone for being such a good boy about the bath. I could see him through the kitchen window. He had fallen asleep while chewing the bone, which lay next to him, half eaten. His little puppy potbelly rose and fell with every breath as his wet fur dried in the afternoon sun.

Gas chambe
r? I thought. The words echoed in my brain with a muffled dullness, like the way ears ring in the immediate aftermath of an explosion.
Who on earth would throw a puppy like
Blue into a gas chamber? Is that even legal?

I had Dr. Milne’s scrap paper in hand, and I needed her four specific questions answered. Turner was at first open and forthcoming with lots of information, which it turns out included all of the first-known details about Blue’s life.

Blue, after her group rescued him from the animal-control center, had gone to live on what she described as a farm where she was fostering about twenty dogs. Most of them are Chihuahuas, which she said hold a special place in her heart, but some- thing about Blue’s face made her feel that he was exceptional, too. She said that Blue had loved playing with all of her other foster dogs, and that he practically sang with delight when she rocked him in her arms. He had been learning to sleep and eat in a crate at her urging and without any complaint, and he’d grown especially fond of a big Labrador mix who lived on the farm as well. The two of them had become inseparable, Turner said.

I thanked her for having saved him, and for all of the work her group had done to bring him to my attention. I assured her that he was loved and well cared for, and that he had, in fact, just returned from a checkup at the veterinarian’s office.

Then I slowly but determinedly turned the conversation back to its original purpose. I needed to know the cause of Blue’s scabs, and why and how he was treated for ringworm.

“Oh, he never had a test for ringworm,” she said, about as casually as a mother of five whose youngest child is screaming bloody murder over nothing but a little ol’ scraped knee. “The vet who neutered him said his rash looked like it could have been ringworm, so that’s why the paper says that.”

“Great,” I said, checking off one of Dr. Milne’s questions from the list. “So where it says ‘treated for ringworm,’ what does that mean?”

“Well,” she replied, measuring her words, “it means that I treated him for ringworm.”

I couldn’t tell whether she thought I was some variation of an obnoxious soccer mom, or if she was just uncomfortable about me asking questions in general, but her tone was definitely changing. She was becoming defensive.

“I’m sorry if I sound pushy,” I pressed, “but my veterinarian asked me to find out exactly how Blue was treated for ringworm. We are trying to make sure he has the best possible care now. Any information you can give me about how he was treated would be really helpful.”

A few seconds went by, and Turner said nothing. It seemed to me that she was hesitant to answer the question at all.

I let the silence hang in the air, and after a few more seconds, she filled it.

“I treated him the way I was told to treat him,” she said. “With bleach and Monistat.”

Again, I found myself pausing, trying to digest what she’d just told me.

“Did you say … bleach?” I asked.

“That’s what I was told to do,” she said. “The veterinarian from spay/neuter said I could treat with bleach and Monistat.”

Monistat
, I thought.
Mon-i-stat.
I racked my brain until I remembered where I’d seen it: on the drugstore shelf, in the section for vaginal anti-yeast cream.

“It definitely worked,” Turner continued as I tried to calm my own racing thoughts. “None of my other dogs got the same rash, and some of them are as little as three pounds apiece. He was playing with all of them. They would’ve had it by now if it was contagious.”

Still, I remained silent. I looked at the thirty-eight dollars’ worth of shampoo and skin cream on my kitchen counter.
On a
puppy’s skin? On anybody’s skin? Bleach?
I couldn’t get the word out of my mind.

“You know, he also had toxidia when I found him,” she said.

“Toxidia?” I replied, snapping my attention back to our conversation. “What the heck is toxidia?”

“Not toxidia,” she corrected me, sounding less like a crazy person and more like someone with lots of animal-care experience. “Coccidia. It’s serious diarrhea. Puppies can get dehydrated from it and die. He lost three pounds in a single week. I got him healthy and put the weight back on him.”

Turner was now talking with great pride, but I was reeling like an elephant stunned by a dart filled with brain tranquilizers. I again looked out the window at Blue, who was as content as could be sleeping under the sun. Aside from his tiny scabs, he seemed as happy and healthy as any puppy I’d ever known. It was challenging, if not impossible, to imagine that just a couple of weeks earlier he had been in line to be tossed into a gas chamber, was so sick with diarrhea that he couldn’t keep weight on, and was covered in some kind of a rash that left people coating his skin with bleach and vaginal anti-yeast cream.

Turner was kind enough to say that I could call her back at any time if I needed additional information. From her end, I surmised, everything she’d said was routine. A job well done.

I thanked her, hung up the telephone, and walked outside to the deck. Blue’s ears perked up and then his eyes opened, and he lifted his head out of what looked like a deep slumber. I sat down and crossed my legs, and he crawled into my lap. He curled himself into a ball, rested his head on my thigh, and went peacefully back to sleep.

So began our two-week quarantine for what, mercifully, ended up not being ringworm. I’ll never know for sure what actually caused Blue’s rash because all of his tests came back negative and his scabs continued to heal. Baby Avery never had any problems, and I—despite a few paranoid moments of feeling phantom itches all over my body for absolutely no reason whatsoever—got to enjoy two whole weeks of paying extra-special attention to Blue. Since I work from home as a writer and have the benefit of making my own hours, there was lots of time spent with just the two of us practicing basic commands, learning how to walk on a leash, and playing on the backyard grass. And it was in the backyard that I started to realize Blue not only had an exceptional emotional effect on a good number of people, but also on other dogs.

At just twenty pounds during those first weeks at home, Blue was literally a third of Stella’s size. She’s as solid as dogs come, with a strong proud chest, a big square forehead, and muscles so carved and pronounced that you’d think she was hitting the weight room for a few deltoid reps in between her walks at the park. Between her looks and her personality, I used to joke that Stella was an all-star linebacker living in a world filled with powder-puff cheerleaders. She didn’t approach other dogs and ask them politely if they wanted to play. She ran up to other dogs and gave them the canine version of a smack across the head as if to insist, “Let’s wrestle!”

Blue, on the other hand, was a typical awkward puppy, so eager to run that he sometimes forgot which feet he was supposed to move next. He had all the requisite loose skin on his back and baby fat around his waistline, and his natural instinct was to be cautious and protect himself around other dogs, just as he did with people. He also had what I came to appreciate as a pretty sharp brain inside his little noggin, using it at first to outsmart Stella and then to win her respect.

My backyard is surrounded by a four-foot-tall, split-rail fence. Inside is about fifteen hundred square feet of nothing but freshly mowed grass. Around the fence is the rest of my property, a few wooded acres with tall, old-growth trees. Deer tend to wander by, and though the yard is plenty big for Stella to run at a full sprint, she decided early on that she wanted to follow the deer into the woods instead. She quickly figured out how to leap clear over the fence, pretty much in a single bound. Soon after, I installed an invisible, electrical fence around the regular one, as well as a shock collar around Stella’s neck to keep her safely inside the yard.

Blue had no need for a shock collar; it took him a few days to even bark at the deer, let alone try to chase them. But once he took a liking to getting his nose right up into the fence to bark at the deer, he began to realize that Stella always stayed a few feet behind. He would actually look back over his shoulder at her, like an army cadet puzzled by his sergeant’s reluctance to engage in the heart of the action. Stella’s safety border, Blue was figuring out, was about three feet from the fence edge. Any closer, and she got a warning buzz from her collar.

Blue took about two days to turn Stella’s safety zone into his own. He couldn’t run as fast as she could, but he was quick enough that he could get about halfway across the yard before she caught up to him in a game of chase. He’d prod her and coax her into playing, and then he would run and run his little heart out, and she’d chase after him like a cheetah. When he heard her steps beating down upon him, he’d dart into the three-foot safety zone and run as close as he could to the fence line. Stella continued to chase him back and forth, but always from a distance where she couldn’t actually reach him. They would do this for hours a day, always with the same pattern and result. Blue had figured out how to outsmart the bigger, stronger playmate simply by using the rules of the field to his advantage.

I watched this scene unfold for a few days, thought about making T-shirts that read “Mommy’s Little Genius,” and in general forgot that we were in fact quarantined instead of just plain having a good time. Then, after five or six days, I noticed the strategies of their game beginning to change. Instead of Blue nipping at Stella until she chased him, and then him dashing as fast as he could to beat her to the safety zone, I watched in awe as Stella intentionally—dare I say gracefully—let Blue walk right past her to get to the fence and start the game from there.

Now, grace has never been part of Stella’s personality. Assertive? Yes. Aggressive? Never with people, but sometimes with other dogs. Polite? About as often as an Ultimate Fighter going for the title at a pay-per-view main event. And yet she had not only decided to accept this puppy, but also to accommodate him. He appeared to have earned her respect. He had softened her edges just the same way he’d eased the worst of my grief about Floyd’s death. Blue was somehow Zen-like, a calming presence in and of himself.