In 1979, my
grandmother and my uncle purchased a business.
It had once been a thriving kennel, breeding cocker spaniels and poodles
and boarding the hapless pets of even more hapless humans. At the helm were two elderly sisters. They were getting along in years, and they
were not small, delicate people. It was
no longer easy to clean the floor—even to see
the floor beyond their considerable and frighteningly garish housedresses—to
see to keep the handwritten ledger books, or even to toss the dead puppies over
the fence. My mother’s youngest sibling, Bill, had been employed there in his
early teens. Despite the
less-than-appealing elements of the job, he had enjoyed it. We were close in age, if not in temperament,
and we’d spent hours walking along the drainage culvert between his
neighborhood and the mall, daydreaming out loud about what life would be like
if we had a kennel of our own.
Wishing to help
her only son to find his niche in the world, my grandmother moved quickly in
response to the news that the massive sisters wished to sell the business. The
day we took possession, there were two dogs in the kennel. I was fifteen, Bill seventeen. We bounded across the threshold, flush with
the pride of ownership. Well, Bill and
my grandmother were owners. I was just an employee, but I was still excited.
The smell just
about knocked us back out the door.
Butch the Bassett Hound and Arky the St. Bernard looked hopefully up at
us from the urine-soaked linoleum.
Cleaning had not been the ladies’ forte.
The next day was my first in charge of the afternoon kennel shift. I let the dogs outside into their runs,
poured oatmeal-colored cylinders of kibble into the rusty tin feeders, changed
the water in their water bowls, and then scooped the outside runs. Reflexively holding my breath, I stepped back
into the building. It seemed as though
it should have taken longer. What had I
forgotten? I stood in front of Arky’s pen and asked him. He looked down at his feet, and I
remembered. Mopping. I was supposed to mop the floor! I knew I had missed something. I might not be the employee of the year just
yet.
Butch was picked
up by his happy owners in another week, and they promised to bring him back the
next time they went away. Arky’s owner,
it turned out, really didn’t want him any more.
He was huge, well over a hundred pounds, with a long, silky coat, a
playful disposition, and jowls dripping with green-tinged slobber. She paid for
him to stay with us for another full year, during which his health declined
despite our ministrations. We loved him;
he was our silly companion through long days of work and reconstruction.
It took us a while
to renovate the original structure. We started inside, replacing the redolent wood
with chain link panels, then ripping up the decaying linoleum. After quite a
lot of scrubbing, we slathered the floors with a few coats of marine epoxy
paint and hoped for the best. Before the
two new buildings that followed had even been bid, before we had managed to
replace the crazy quilt of scrap wood, chicken wire, and chain link that made
up the outdoor runs and the yard enclosures, we had a special guest.
Cookie
was a Maltese, all silky white hair with little black button eyes and nose.
Cookie’s family had left her in our capable hands while they vacationed in some
delightfully dog-free location. They had
not looked back. Cookie was not
pleased.
In her view,
confinement was confinement, even in a suite as gloriously spacious as the new
Steward Kennels had to offer. Never mind
that she had a soft bed, room service, and spacious accommodations indoors and
out. She did not have her family, and
she did not have her freedom. She could
not seem to make us understand that the situation was untenable. She decided to
demonstrate.
One evening in her
outdoor run, Cookie managed to wriggle out from between the wooden fencepost
and the slightly bent galvanized gate. Free from her cell, Cookie looked
around to see what was next. She catapulted
herself toward the greenest pastures that she could see, which happened to be
the front yard of the house in which I resided (and in which the kennel office
was housed). From across the yard, I saw the flash of white. Adrenaline
coursed through me, and I shouted for Bill.
Cookie made short work of the gate into that yard, too, squeezing
through before we could get to her. What
she did not know was that there were some maintenance projects long
overdue in that yard.
Bill and I dove
through the gate after her as dusk was falling, afraid that she would be harder
and harder to find in the tall grass that choked that mostly-untended
piece of property. My grandmother lived downstairs, behind the office, and my
mother and I lived upstairs. Bill lived
across the driveway, in an apartment he’d painted himself. This was the explanation for the bathroom
being electric lime, the living room gold, and the bedroom midnight blue. You
might think that two teenagers, faced with a situation in which our livelihood
and reputation was clearly and decidedly on the line, would call for help. That didn’t really occur to us. The only
other people on the premises were our mothers, neither of them experienced in
canine retrieval. We were the dog
handlers, and we had better figure something out.
Our own dogs were
the only ones who had ever used the yard, and they tended to stay pretty close
to the house. The fence was ancient,
rusty, and sagging dangerously in places, held up primarily by the prodigious
growth of honeysuckle that had practically swallowed it whole. Our own dogs had made no attempt to breach the
perimeter, so we had no idea how it would stand up to a determined
escapee. Not well, we guessed.
The sound that
came next was remarkably clear and distinct.
Glunk!
Cookie had
discovered something that even we did not know.
She discovered that the ground around the septic tank was somewhat
unstable. If one were a small dog, one
could fall in, and one apparently had.
It was a splashy
sound, but splashing in something thicker than water. It didn't smell all
that great, either. A string of profanity followed from Bill, who had
almost fallen in, himself. He described the situation to me, his voice
cracking with tension. I ran to the
garage to find something, anything that might aid in the removal of a dog from
a septic situation.
I found one. I don't know why we had a fishing net, but we
did. I grabbed it and raced back to the edge of the hole.
More
splashing ensued, and more profanity. A
dog-paddling dog in sewage is not as easy to catch in a net as one might
imagine. I stayed a few feet away, ready to try to head her off if she
bolted out. I was afraid to come closer,
ashamed for letting Bill do all the work even though he had warned me not to
come near the hole. He wrestled with the
net. Finally, in almost full darkness, he pulled her out. Reaching
into the net in relief, he slipped his hand around her collar.
Our
small friend was not all that pleased with this turn of events, or any of the events of the last day
or so. Cookie sank her teeth into his hand. With a surprised
bellow, he let go, and she was off. Like a streak of liquid
garbage, she shot across the yard toward the decrepit fence along the
road. We tried to follow, but it was overgrown with weeds and briar
bushes, and we lost her.
A
day went by. We searched, we called.
WILM and WJBR offered free radio ads for lost dogs, and we ran ads immediately. Finding
the dog was more important than not raising eyebrows by broadcasting our
failure. My four-year-old cousin, considered
with great confidence by the family to have psychic powers, was
consulted. "Can you see a little white dog near grandma's house?
She's lost, and Uncle Bill is trying to find her."
He shook his
head. He saw a dog, he said, but it was not white. It was kind of
brown.
Well,
yes, that very well might be. Is the dog okay?
Yes.
Where is
she?
She's walking down
the road near Grandma's.
I
was a little bit sullen about this, because some people though I was pretty darn
psychic, too, but it was the only lead we had. We walked up and down that road,
and she did not appear. We sat in the
kennel office together until late that night, willing the phone to ring, worried
about Cookie and discouraged about the whole business. Losing guests was
probably not the shortest road to a reputation as the premier pet hotel in the
tri-state area.
But my cousin
might not have been wrong, after all, because the next day, we received a call
from the neighborhood just beyond ours. Someone
had Cookie. We called Cookie’s owner to give them the good news. They said that
they would prefer to fetch her themselves, and they returned early from their
vacation to retrieve one still-stinky but otherwise unhurt dog.
We
had a cover built for the septic tank, but Cookie’s family never boarded her
with us again. Go figure.
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