Black Ribbon

structures not merely painted in brilliant colors, but also trimmed, striped, and embellished in primary green, sunshine yellow, vivid blue, glowing purple, vibrating red, screaming orange, and every other bright color in between. An agility course suggests a schoolyard playground designed by a gymnastically inclined ex-army sergeant turned dog obedience instructor. This equipment looked brand-new. The pause table hadn’t even been painted. It sat on shiny metal legs, and the dogs would pause on a top of raw wood. The seesaw was the kind now deemed unsafe for children, except that it was set low to the ground for our group of novice dogs. Also, its board lacked the usual handles, of course, and every twelve inches or so, a little strip of wood ran across to provide footing for the dogs. One of the tunnels was a big, tough version of the long, flexible fabric-covered ones sold for children; the other was an open barrel with what looked like a gigantic footless stocking pulled over one end. The dog walk, a canine balance beam, was a narrow horizontal board with ramps at each end. Except for the purple, pink, and green stripes, the PVC bar jumps were identical to Utility practice jumps, and if I’ve lost you, imagine a broom handle held horizontal between two vertical supports. What looked like more broom handles stuck up in rows from metal supports on the ground: weave poles. Heavy chains attached to sturdy wooden frames supported tape-wrapped tires from cars and motorcycles.
    By far the biggest piece of equipment was the A-frame, a massive obstacle consisting of two wide ramps, one going up, the other down; think of an eighteen-foot section of a seaside boardwalk hinged in the middle and raised at the apex to make a giant A. Squatting directly in front of the A-frame, blithely depositing what no one wants to step in, was Eva Spitteler’s big yellow Lab, Bingo. Twenty-six feet away, as far away as a number 8 flex lead allows, Eva was staring upward in apparent search of any wood warblers that might be flitting around high up in the tree canopy. Or maybe she was seeing imaginary creatures in the cumulus clouds, listening to the distant scolding of a red squirrel, wondering whether to include pewter-encrusted medallions of Saint Francis of Assisi in her catalog, or planning a random act of kindness. I do not know.
    Bingo finished. As Eva began to reel him in, I hugged Rowdy to my left side and quietly delivered an abbreviated version of the you-buddy-are-not-the-policeman-of-the-dog-world lecture that opens with a survey of the vile and provocative behaviors in which undisciplined dogs may engage, moves to an acknowledgement of the natural wish to impose order °n chaos, and concludes with a happy reminder that suppressing primitive urges is the price we pay for the multitudinous benefits of civilization. Although the lecture is not meant for human ears, my therapist friend Rita once listened in and accused me of stealing it from Sigmund Freud, who, as I was glad to inform Rita, was a devoted dog owner who’d undoubtedly developed these and numerous other ideas in consultation with his beloved chow chow. I mean, if you wanted to understand what Freud wanted to understand—sex, aggression, appetite, rivalry, and house-training, for starters—who’d be the real expert? A stuffy old Viennese doctor? So if you’re an academic psychologist hungry to publish, there’s a paper in this for you: “The Critical Role of the Chow Chow in the Development of Psychoanalytic Theory: Freud or His Dog? A Controversy Resolved by Reference to the Concept of Castration Anxiety.”
    When I looked up, Heather was standing next to Eva waving a small plastic bag and pointing toward the A-frame. With a look of baffled innocence on her bulldog face, Eva was shaking her head back and forth. I moved a little closer.
    “You’re obviously mistaken,” said Eva. “It must have been someone else’s dog.”
    “I saw him with my own eyes!” Heather told her. “Not thirty seconds ago! You were looking away.”
    Eva was indignant. “Bingo hasn’t been out of my sight one second! I don’t know what dog did that, but it wasn’t him, and I haven’t paid all this money to come here and spend my time shoveling up shit after other people’s dogs, and, if you want my opinion, since you asked for it, for what we’re paying here, you ought to be doing it yourself and saying thanks, because if this is how we’re going to be treated, no