Ruffly Speaking (22 page)

“Well,” said Stephanie, “if you have any of this, uh, gypsum, I’m sure that Matthew would be glad to help do whatever one does with it, Miss Savery. He isn’t home right now, but when he gets home, I’m sure he’d be happy to help. Maybe he could... Is it any use to dig up the affected area?”

Alice Savery said nothing—it’s possible that the sight of Ruffly squatting on the lawn rendered her speechless. I touched Stephanie’s arm to get her attention. “Stephanie, uh, where do you keep your pooper-scooper? I’ll run over and get it.”

“Oh, don’t bother,” Stephanie said.

Alice Savery’s eyes narrowed. Mine probably did, too. Cleaning up after your dog is one of the basics. I wasn’t familiar with the program that had trained Ruffly and placed him with Stephanie, but the particular program didn’t matter. Every hearing dog organization drills its human students in the fundamentals of responsible ownership and emphasizes that every hearing dog is an ambassador for all hearing dogs. How could Stephanie possibly...?

She redeemed herself. Pulling a plastic bag from a side pocket of her dress, she said casually, “I’ll take care of it.”

While Stephanie was heading across the lawn, Alice Savery grumbled audibly. Her piercing eyes moved back and forth as if scanning for the presence of a sinister eavesdropper. When she spoke, her voice was rank with suspicion. “One sees what one sees.” The woman had the air of reluctantly granting me a glimpse into some vast store of secret knowledge. “One hears what one hears.”
People who watch and listen often do,
I thought.

22

 Existentialism died this year. Or, maybe, yesteryear; I can’t be sure. Its trappings survive. Take Leah: Camus and black. But the essence perished, and what killed it was the normalization of the absurd. I must be behind the times, or, maybe, unbeknownst to me, I’m stuck in some crucial stage of the grieving process. I’m working on it, though. I’ve practiced the sentence until I can get it out fine. All I can’t do is utter it with a straight face. “Hi, I’m Holly,” I say, “and this is my swine, Luigi.”

Not that I have anything against pigs—or against any of the other pitifully inadequate dog substitutes with which the spiritually impoverished attempt to enrich their bleak, allergic lives. On the contrary, I’ve always been a fan of the theater of the absurd, and if you doubt me, consider the angst that’s plagued me ever since a neighbor of mine, Frank, acquired Leo, a Vietnamese potbellied pig. Not that there’s anything wrong with Leo. Far from it. He’s hideous, and his hoofs require rather frequent trimming, but he’s perfectly friendly. There’s nothing wrong with Frank, either. No, the sick individual in the family isn’t Leo or Frank, but Frank’s wife, a frigid woman with whom poor Frank endured five unspeakably frustrating years of sham marriage, sixty maddening months of abstinence with a so-called partner who denied him the most basic marital right of all: the right to a family dog. Her excuse? Not headaches. Sneezing. Painful, watery eyes. Asthma, I think. And when she was desperate to get out of it, hives, too. Frank’s dilemma? Roman Catholic. And, in fact, the Church is what saved his marriage: It was Father Leo Bianci, S.J., who proposed the solution—the pig. Hence, the name.

My anguish? When I told Steve Delaney about Leo, I casually added something like, “Gee, I wonder what Rowdy and Kimi will make of a pig,” and, instead of pausing to mull over the situation the way he usually does, Steve had an instant reply: “Pork chops.”

So when I arrived home from Stephanie Benson’s, I was glad to find Steve there, not only because I’m always happy to see him, but also because, ever since Leo’s arrival, I hate walking Rowdy and Kimi alone at night. In the daytime, I can always spot Leo from a distance and do a swift about-turn, but, after dark, I’m always afraid that we’ll come upon the pig suddenly and that the dogs will lunge before I can stop them. So Steve is always a good dog-walking companion, but if, God forbid, one of the dogs somehow managed to get loose and attack Leo, a veterinarian would obviously be the perfect person to have on hand.

Steve had let himself in and was sitting at the kitchen table idly fooling around with Rowdy and Kimi while simultaneously drinking Geary’s and studying an article on salivary cysts. Anyone with a delicate stomach does well to avoid veterinary medicine and, for that matter, dogs altogether, but, so far as I know, nothing actually compels vets to crave spaghetti whenever they’re reading up on tapeworms. Salivary cysts? Press on them, and what you get is brownish fluid, but don’t tell Geary’s I said so. Maine needs all the business it can get.

The evening was cool for Cambridge in early July, and pig-free, too, at least on the route we took, Concord to Fayerweather, then across Huron and up the sociogeo-graphic hill toward Governor Weld’s house and Brattle Street. Steve walked Kimi, and I took Rowdy, who suddenly becomes a one-person dog whenever he decides that Kimi is edging him out in their rivalry for my affection. As we walked, I told Steve about everything that had happened at Stephanie Benson’s, with particular emphasis on Ruffly, of course.

“What he did was very, very sudden,” I said. “One second, he was standing there, and the next second, he’d jerked his head to the side and flattened his ears. Steve, it was exactly as if someone had slapped him.”

“And what was he doing just before that?”

“Standing there, I think.”

“Alert?”

“He’s always alert. His ears were up. And if I remember it right, his tail was wagging a little. But he wasn’t reacting to one of his sounds, if that’s what you mean, and the doorbell wasn’t ringing or anything like that. I don’t know! He was just
there."

“Any trembling?”

“I don’t think so. He did seem frightened, I guess, but I don’t think he was shaking.”

“And after?Anything about his gait?”

“Nothing. Why? When you saw him, did You...?”

“No.”

“You look as if there’s something…”

“I’d better get a neurological consult. Treating these assistance dogs—”

“Steve, I am telling you, it didn’t look neurological. You should’ve seen it! It just did not look medical.”

“That’s a real risky assumption, Holly. I wish I’d seen it. One of the things about treating these dogs is that the owners depend on them, so you’re real reluctant to bring the animal in for observation. If Mrs. Benson’s open to it, I’m going to stop by this weekend.”

“I’m sure she will be, and she understands about tonight.” Steve trains with Cambridge, too. Since we don’t meet in the summer, he’d assumed he’d have that Thursday evening free and had volunteered to do a rabies immunization clinic at a local shelter.

We paused to let the dogs sniff an overgrown privet hedge. Rowdy made a couple of passes at it, cocked his leg, lowered it, turned around, and hit the spot again. Then Kimi checked it out and, not to be outdone, squeezed her hindquarters against the privet and executed a full rear-end bounce. Steve laughed. A man who admires the sight of a bitch lifting both legs at once? And a vet, too? The man for me. Ah, love.

After this romantic little interlude, we returned to the topic of Ruffly, and Steve said, “Tell me about the environment.”

“What?” The request threw me for a second. Sure, that hyperintellectual Off-Brattle coldness is toxic. But enough to sicken a dog?

“Anything that could serve as a stimulus,” Steve explained patiently.

“I just had a thought. If there is a stimulus, then wouldn’t Morris’s dogs have shown some response to it, too?”

“It’s worth finding out,” Steve said.

“I’ll ask Doug Winer. He has Morris’s dogs. He’ll know. Also, after it happened, I went outside to see if there was anything there, and there wasn’t, really, except that Ivan, the little boy Leah’s always talking about, was
_r
ight in the middle of the next-door neighbor’s lawn dumping a lot of salt there.”

“That old trick.”

“Well, with this woman, it really was meaner than it sounds, because her garden is incredible. She must work on it all the time. So it’s not like killing plants in my yard. It’s more like doing something to one of my dogs, except that the grass doesn’t actually suffer. But from her point of view, Miss Savery’s, that’s more or less what it’s like. Really, the garden
is
her dog! And Ivan had some friends with him, and they set off cherry bombs. Anyhow, Stephanie and Ruffly came out, and then while Stephanie was talking to Alice Savery, Ruffly messed on her lawn, and the sort of strange thing was, that’s one of the things she complains about—she actually went to the police about it; Kevin told me—but Stephanie has no idea. Stephanie had a plastic bag with her, and she cleaned up after Ruffly right away, but Alice Savery didn’t say anything to her about it.”

We reached Huron, and Steve and I fell silent until we’d crossed. Huron’s a fairly busy street, even at night, and my wolf gray dogs are so effectively camouflaged for night predation that I’m always afraid that a driver will see me, overlook Rowdy and Kimi, and inadvertently head toward them. I like to imagine that if that ever happens, I’ll hurl myself between the dogs and the car, but some dreadful survival instinct would probably make me chicken out, and for the rest of my life, I’d have to live with the knowledge that I’d failed to save the best Part of myself.

When we reached the posh side of Huron, Steve asked, “You told Stephanie about the neighbor’s complaints?”

“No. I thought about it, but I decided, why worry her? Anyway, what just occurred to me was that if Ruffly
is
ever loose, which I don’t believe he is, then he could be getting into something, plants or weed killer or lawn chemicals or whatever, and maybe that’s what’s causing his odd behavior. But I really don’t think he is. Stephanie is the model dog owner, superresponsible, and even if she weren’t, she needs Ruffly. There’s just no way...”

“Since we’re—” Steve broke off. “Holly, any chance this is hand-shyness?”

“
Stephanie?”

“Yeah, Stephanie,” he said. “Or someone else?”

“No! No one could, really. Ruffly is with Stephanie twenty-four hours a day. And Stephanie would just not hit him, and I can’t imagine that she’d let anyone hit him, either.” I was indignant.

“When this, uh, attack occurred, exactly where were the two of them?”

“In the kitchen. She was putting something in the refrigerator. Ruffly was... Well, he wasn’t sticking his nose in the refrigerator. He was maybe, I don’t know, two yards away?”

“And you were watching...?”

“Ruffly. In fact, I even remember what I was thinking. I was thinking that he must definitely have some Papillon in him. Because of the big ears.”

“Possible.” Steve nodded. “But what I’m asking is whether you could see Stephanie or whether the refrigerator door was blocking your view of her.”

I thought back. “Yeah. It was. That’s how it opens. So, no, I guess I could see part of her, her back or whatever. But, mostly, the door was in the way.”

“So, in theory, it is possible that she—”

“Physically, yes, she could’ve done something; she could’ve given him a signal or made some kind of gesture.”

“Someone outside?”

“Someone walking through the yard? I’m not sure. If that happens, he ought do
something
—go to the window, point toward it, show some kind of reaction. I suppose Ivan could’ve been there. Also, look. As far as I know, Matthew was with Leah. But Matthew isn’t a stranger, so maybe when it’s just Matthew coming home... I don’t know. Maybe whatever Ruffly does then is very low-key.”

“This neighbor?”

“Alice Savery. Well, Ruffly must be used to her, because Morris’s house—Stephanie’s, now—is right next to hers, and Miss Savery’s outside all the time, working in her garden, so, to a hearing dog, she must be background noise. Except... No, it couldn’t have been, I think, because I went out only a minute or two after it happened, and by then Ivan was on her front lawn. So if she’d been outside a few minutes earlier, she’d have noticed him. That’s one of her chronic complaints, kids in her yard. If she’d been outside, she’d have seen him, and she’d have done something, believe me.”

“Huh. And then we’re back to what the stimulus was.”

“Rolled-up newspaper! Steve, I just thought of it.
That’s
how you make a dog hand-shy from a distance. Or some other object. Those dogs don’t cringe when you reach toward them. What terrifies them is when you stand back and raise your arm.”