Dogged Pursuit Page 10

  But they’ve all seen me now and are watching me make my way over. I could, I suppose, shrug theatrically to signal defeat and begin dolefully retracing my steps. Both Cyndi and Andi are the kind of girl who’d be sure to understand, or give me the benefit of the doubt if they didn’t.

  But I’m not so sure about Marilyn. I’ve allowed our eyes briefly to meet. That steely gaze has already locked onto mine. I’ve as good as told her “expect me.” So I feel obligated to forge ahead.

  Marilyn, you see, intimidates me. We’ve been training together for years, but she’s so taciturn I barely know her. Most of the people in our class jabber away like cockatoos, but Marilyn isn’t just the quiet type; she’s quiet with intent. You can tell she’s actively listening, that not a thing is escaping her. And she’s listened to. When she does condescend to say something—briefly, in as few words as will do the job—all heads swivel to take it in. She also gives the distinct impression of saying just a bit less than she’s thinking, which is an extremely rare quality and always intriguing. She is, in short, a natural figure of authority. I’ve always been a little awkward around those.

  What’s more, she’s a strapping, athletic woman who exudes physicality and power. Even standing in repose, she seems to be daring you to try and knock her down. None of which would be quite so daunting if she weren’t also an absolutely phenomenal agility competitor. When she runs her black Lab, River, all that innate power translates into the sheerest grace. They’re so clean together, so elegant, they barely stir the air. Watching them is a sobering reminder of how very far I have to go with Dusty.

  Suddenly, I wonder what on earth Marilyn, of all people, is doing at a novice trial. I then notice her daughter Eryn, a slight, pretty thing with saucer eyes and an honest-to-God peaches-and-cream complexion, the kind Victorian manuals used to extol. She wouldn’t be out of place in a Merchant Ivory film, wearing a bonnet and reading a letter beneath a tree. She’s very young—possibly a teenager, though if so a newly-minted one—and I remember her as an actual child, all pink and giggly, from back when I was competing with Carmen. It’s a shock to see her suddenly so long of limb, so angular. It’s Eryn who’s the novice here, and looking into those large, clear eyes I can see another iron-willed competitor in the making. Agility is still a new sport, but it seems to be breeding its first dynasties.

  I’ve arrived just in time to see Cyndi compete in the FAST trial with her boxer, Piper. She qualifies, though complains it’s the first time she’s ever Q’d without also placing. She jokes about how naked she’ll feel going home without a ribbon. From anyone else this might come off as arrogance, but Cyndi is possibly the most jovial human being I’ve ever met—her good humor is a kind of superpower. As if in infancy she was rocketed to earth from a distant planet where the inhabitants do nothing but laugh.

  Andi is up for a title too, in standard, and she has a good chance of winning it. Inexplicably, her golden retriever, Kelly, pops out of the weaves one pole too soon, and Andi doesn’t go back to correct the mistake. This costs her a Q. I can see the look of resignation on her face as she moves on, and don’t understand it. When she completes her run and comes back to where we’re all huddled against the wall, Marilyn is merciless with her: “Why didn’t you fix the weaves?”

  “I thought I’d already blown it,” Andi says, blushing in embarrassment. “We had too many refusals, didn’t we?”

  “No,” Marilyn says, “you didn’t. You could’ve titled, idiot.” And with lightning swiftness she reaches out and flicks Andi’s forehead.

  Almost at once a red welt appears in the middle of Andi’s ivory brow. She gasps, then looks at me and says, “She flicked me!”—as if there were something I ought to do about it. She turns back to Marilyn and says, “You’re always flicking me! Don’t flick me!”

  “It’s for your own good,” says Marilyn, and there’s a glint of wicked glee in her eyes. For the first time I realize: Marilyn is funny. Marilyn is a scamp. It comes as a bit of a shock. What’s more surprising is that these people are so natural around me—even inclusive. I really feel like I’ve cracked the inner circle now and am seeing what they’re like behind the professional facade. Though, admittedly, there remains a little voice in my head admonishing me: “See, you still don’t really know them.”

  The biggest surprise of the day comes during my jumpers run with Dusty. I feel only the most perfunctory degree of performance anxiety, a sizeable chunk of my mind already strategizing the drive home.

  The course starts with a tunnel, an unusual opener, but that’s good for us—Dusty loves the tunnel. When I’m given the nod from the timer, I send him into it, and when he pops out it’s like wham, wham, wham: jump, jump, front cross to the right, jump—then another tunnel, doubling back, jump, jump, jump, jump, reverse cross into a third tunnel, jump again. So far it’s been magic—no refusals, no off courses, even decent speed. I can hear myself gasping as I run, but it feels like I’m holding my breath.

  We’re headed for the penultimate obstacle: the weave poles. There are only six of them in novice, and that’s an advantage. Everything depends on nailing the entry: he’s got to take the first pole with his left shoulder. He’s on my left already, which should make it easier to scoop him right in there. But if he screws it up—I’ve seen handlers waste an appalling amount of time trying to fix a bad weave-pole entry. Hell, I’ve been one of those handlers. You keep calling the dog back and trying to angle him in again, but he’s confused; you’ve lost your momentum, and you can sense the judge behind you, her hands working madly, signaling refusal after refusal.

  Dusty enters the weave poles with his left shoulder. I’m so astonished, I momentarily balk. He balks too, but I recover in time to get him moving again before he can slip out. Second pole, third, fourth—my God, we’re going to do it. We’re going to nail the weaves on the first try.

  After the fourth pole he stops to sneeze. I nearly swoon from anxiety. But I will him to continue. What I am saying? I howl for him to continue: “Come on, boy, almost there!” And then we’re through the fifth pole.

  And the sixth.

  And over the final jump.

  For a moment, I’m dizzy, disoriented. There’s applause; I can hear people hooting. Then it hits me: we’ve done it.

  We’ve Q’d.

  We have our novice jumpers title.

  Glory.

  My hands tremble as I take Dusty’s leash from the railing and reattach it to him. I feel like I might hyperventilate, so I take him back to the crate, give him some final words of congratulations and a big hug (he stiffens immediately, as if to say, “For God’s sake, people are watching”), then make straight for the door and plunge myself into the cold, clear air.

  Glory.

  Outside there’s a parade and fireworks in my head. But the sudden quiet, the chilly mist, and the absence of other people are at odds with my unfettered joy. I try to maintain my euphoria, nurse it along—visualize myself picking up speed toward the national championships—but inevitably the prosaic weight of physical reality crushes all my fantasies of triumph. This really isn’t anything to get all excited about. It’s just the first step in a long, long process. A novice title, nothing more. Probably dozens of people have picked one up today.

  I take a deep breath to put the seal on my new humility, and then head back inside. Just as suddenly as the cold, uncaring outer world had overwhelmed me, once indoors I’m instantly enveloped by esprit de corps: greetings, congratulations, joyful smiles from those who improbably, endearingly, treat my success as if it were their own. Andi gives me a big hug and tells me how proud she is; Marilyn tells me she’s recorded my run on her video cam, in case I’d like to see it later. I try thanking them, but it comes out sounding so much less than adequate.

  “Do you know what you did at the weave poles?” Marilyn asks.

  I blink. I have no idea what she’s talking about and tell her so.

  “You really don’t remember?”

  I reassu
re her I don’t.

  She grins. “When Dusty stopped and sneezed, you actually said gesundheit.”

  Everyone laughs, and I feel it welling up in me again, despite all my better inclinations toward pragmatism. What the hell—it’s just for today:

  Glory.

  CHAPTER 14

  A Day at the Orifice

  As it turns out, we didn’t merely qualify, we took second place in the sixteen-inch division. A crimson ribbon bearing our names is issued to us, along with a white and gold “new title” ribbon; I place them both on the dashboard as I drive home, thinking perhaps to wow and astonish other drivers on the road.

  As we merge onto the highway, I practice saying aloud, “Dusty NAJ.” This is the official AKC abbreviation for his new title (Novice Agility Jumpers with Weaves). It trips delightfully off my tongue. I’m confident that it’s only the first of a long chain of titles—Dee’s Kaleigh, for example, is MACH3 CDX JHV SHFur SHF RE MXF TDI CGC (which looks a lot like what that chimp on the typewriter might produce on his way to King Lear)—but for the moment I’m thrilled just to have the one.

  When you earn a title on the first day of an agility trial, you can usually request an immediate “move up” so you can compete in your new class on the second day. But this is a novice-only trial, so there’s no open class for me to move up to. I could still run in both standard and jumpers tomorrow, but now that we’ve got our NAJ title only the standard run will count for anything.

  This leaves me wondering, on the way home, whether I should even bother coming back. It’s an awfully long drive to make for just one run—and as an extra dissuasion the return traffic is beyond heinous. What should be an hour’s drive ends up taking three. My fault, for waiting around to the very end of the trial, but I’d wanted to corral the judge into posing for a snapshot with Dusty and me brandishing our ribbons. Well, I have the photo, fine, but now it’s costing me. My neck is stiff, my ass cheeks sore, my legs are numb, and my patience has been slowly shredded. I never want to set foot in an automobile again, and to judge by the nervous panting I hear behind me, Dusty feels the same way.

  By the time we get home I have a searing headache. I’m supposed to cook dinner tonight—honey-glazed pork tenderloin in a fennel-mascarpone sauce; all the ingredients are sitting primly in the fridge—but I’m too shattered to face the task, so we just order a pizza instead. In the meantime, Jeffrey cracks open a bottle of champagne to celebrate Dusty’s first title. Alas, I’m in such a state I can barely enjoy it. Yet I drink three full glasses in a vain attempt to dull the pain.

  I lay awake all night, tossing and turning as my head throbs, and I feel like I’m bleeding from my eyes. Somewhere in the ridiculously early hours, I manage to fall asleep from sheer exhaustion, but the alarm clock trills to life soon after. I lie there limp and dazed, feeling worse than I have in a very long time. The crippling headache still has me in its malevolent grip and is enjoying a helping hand from a spanking new hangover. Accent on the “spanking.” Well, I’d been waffling over returning to Spring Grove; now I emphatically decide against it. I’d much prefer just to lie here and wait quietly for death to claim me.

  Yet once this decision is made, I feel something inside me—some wriggling, niggling sense of honor—rail against it. “Is this the behavior of a champion?” it says. “One minuscule victory and you retire from the field. That’s the great goal you’ve been chasing? The first difficulty you face, the first physical hardship, and you pack up your single laurel and withdraw? So much for your vaunted ambition.”

  I roll over, and the inner voice waits for me to readjust on the pillow, then continues: “And what about your friends? They were so supportive of you, so happy for you, and you’re not going to be there to return the favor? I guess all that blathering on about community was just a bunch of gushy rhetoric.”

  The next thing I know I’m on my feet, muttering and groaning as I fight my way into clothes, splash cold water on my face, down a pair of aspirin, and head downstairs, clutching the walls for support. Dusty follows, blinking and yawning—keeping just enough distance to let me know that he’s with me only conditionally.

  As I pass the living room I smell something sharp, pungent, and unmistakable. I turn on a light and see that, sure enough, sometime during the night Carmen has had a bout of diarrhea in the living room. Whoops—no, two bouts. Hold on—three. In fact it appears she went quite Jackson Pollock in there.

  A wave of almost primal despair washes over me, but I fight it back. I’ve got to man up here. I roll up my sleeves, pick up as much of the mess I can, give the rest a thorough soaking and blotting, and finally run it over with the steam cleaner (which we purchased for just such emergencies). That done, I take Carmen around the block to make sure whatever got into her has now fully worked its way out. She has a few more viscous squats then appears relieved and exhausted. Back in the house, I console her with a brief session of chin scratching, then give her a bowl of bland food with some Cheerios sprinkled on top as a treat. I say a little prayer that I won’t see them again later.

  It’s now too late to have any breakfast myself, but then this un-savory business has killed my appetite. I leash up Dusty and shuttle him out to the car.

  When we arrive at the WAG Building, the noise and closeness of the crowd seem even more unendurable than yesterday, possibly due to my sad physical shape. I seek out a public crate for Dusty, but there’s only one to be had, and it’s very small. I have to insert him like a Thanksgiving turkey into an oven. He gives me a “you’ve got to be kidding” look. I remind him that it’s only temporary.

  I run into Carl and Kim, who are hovering around KC and Fletcher’s crates. We chat for a while about the cramped conditions, and they tell me they’re actually sort of used to it because they live in a condominium. My jaw drops. “You have two Portuguese water dogs, and you live in a condo?”

  “Yeah, I know,” Carl says with a laugh. “We’ve got their crates stacked on top of each other to save space, just like they are here, but still . . .”

  I’m back up front in time to see Andi qualify in FAST. I congratulate her as she comes off the course, but she tosses it off with a shrug. She’s like that: a real team player, always much more emotionally responsive to other people’s achievements. Whereas I’m still motivated principally by dreams of glory. But I can sense myself coming around; I’m genuinely excited by her victory.

  We chat for a while on the sidelines, and I mention my astonishment at Carl and Kim’s living arrangements. “That’s nothing,” she says almost dismissively. “I live in a 750-square-foot apartment.”

  My eyes pop open. “With both Kelly and Whisper?” Her two golden retrievers.

  She nods then adds, with her habitual dry wit, “It can be interesting.”

  There’s something humbling about this. I live in a three-story house and I still feel like I’m tripping over my dogs—so much so that, I admit it, at times I get frustrated and even irate. “Get out of my goddamn way” is a phrase not infrequently heard under my roof. And yet I’ve been accustomed to thinking of myself as a dog lover. Well, obviously I am, but, I now realize, of a decidedly lesser stripe. I’d never even dreamed of getting a dog until I had a house and a yard. A very big house and yard. These people humble me.

  Additional humility is soon on hand in the form of young Eryn, who runs River in FAST. Success, again, greets her easily. The girl is a marvel, really. It’s like the laws of physics change when she gets out there. Inanimate objects jump into her path when she requires them and leap away from her when she doesn’t. She herself just kind of floats.

  So goes the morning. I’m forced to have lunch in my car because there’s no room to maneuver my elbows, much less sit down, in the facility. Seated behind the steering wheel, munching away, I try to enjoy the quiet and isolation, which should be balm for my still-clanging headache. Instead I just feel pathetic. For whatever reason, eating alone in your car is pretty much a benchmark of Scandinavian despair. With th
e rain spattering against the windshield, I feel like a character in a Bergman film, except I’m almost certainly eating better food: a roast-beef sandwich with Gorgonzola and red onion. You’d never find Liv Ullmann partaking of anything quite so robust—or eating at all, now that I think of it. I suppose I could’ve brought Dusty out for company, but it’s coming down just steadily enough to make that a bad idea. I don’t want him even remotely slippery when he runs.

  Wet feet, it turns out, might have been preferable to the conditions in which I left him. When I return to the crate, I find the Skye terrier lodged above him going determinedly berserk. As I get nearer, a stout woman—presumably its owner—goes up to the cage and shrieks, “Shuuuut uuup!” I wonder, with sudden alarm, how frequently she’s been doing that.

  I panic for a second because it looks as though someone has removed Dusty from the crate, but no, there he is, in the very back, pressed against one corner with a look on his face of such inconsolable misery that my guilt nearly knocks me back a full step. I unlatch the door and take him out—he’s as limp as a rag doll—and coo in his ear, stroke him, tell him I’m sorry, I didn’t realize I’d left him in a pressure-cooker, that everything’s going to be all right. “We’ll just do our run, boy—just one run, and then we can go home. You don’t even have to Q. Just get through it and we’ll go.”

  By now my lunch is sitting uneasily in my stomach, and I feel a kind of brisk gastric cha-cha get under way. It probably would’ve been better if sometime during the past dozen-odd hours I’d voided my gut of all the bile and toxins that have accumulated there, but the simple fact is that I haven’t thrown up since 1979. Many people refuse to believe me when I tell them this—as though I’ve claimed to be able to fly or to have met Shakespeare—but it doesn’t seem so extraordinary to me. Vomiting is, after all, an extreme reaction to extreme conditions, and by dint of discipline, moderation, and a bit of luck, I’ve skirted those extremities. No drunk has been dead enough, no flu severe enough, to provoke me to toss my cookies, and for the most part I have no problem with that. From what I remember of puking, it’s not a felicitous activity. But at times like these I can see it has its uses, and as I stand in the hole with Dusty, hearing Krakatoan rumblings from my deep interior, it seems vastly preferable to have endured the indignity of being sick on a roadside shrubbery than to face a sixteen-obstacle gauntlet at a jogging clip.