Black Ribbon

weekly, biweekly, monthly, and annual magazines, tabloids, bulletins, and newsletters. Enough? Really? Well, if you insist. Let’s just say that here in dogs, we like to stay in touch.
    And let me brag a little. Amateurs and professionals alike, from the volunteers who sit at their kitchen tables hunting and pecking out the club newsletters on battered Royal portables to the big-city editors of the high-circulation color glossies, we maintain remarkably high standards of careful, ethical journalism. Amazing, isn’t it, that this periodical cornucopia of dogs-in-print should, week after week, month after month, year after year, abundantly spill forth a fresh and tasteful harvest? And in its sumptuous midst, but a single rotten fruit.
    Strictly between us? Remember, I’ve got a mortgage to pay; a high-mileage Bronco to replace; two big dogs to feed, groom, show, immunize, train, and entertain; and myself to nourish, more or less, and to clothe, too, albeit not in great style, but decently, okay? So if anyone asks, I'm not the one who said it, or at least I’m not the one who said it first, except that, come to think of it, my opinion is identical to everyone else’s, so maybe it doesn’t matter after all, and desperate though I may become to supplement the pittance doled out by Dog's Life, I hope I never have to stoop to scandalmongering for the outrageously gossipy, wildly irresponsible yellow-dog rag known as Dog Beat: The Pulse of the Fancy, the name of which turned out to be weirdly appropriate: In listing Phyllis
    Abbott as a deceased judge, Dog Beat came close to giving her a heart attack.
    We learned about the error, hoax, or what-have-you at the end of dinner, when Don Abbott was called from the table to take a phone call. The caller, we later heard, was a guy named Robert Russell, a fellow pooh-bah of Don’s who’d just received the latest issue and, having talked to Don a few dozen times in the past couple of days, had brilliantly decided either that Phyllis was still alive or that Don had been too preoccupied with AKC politics to notice his wife’s radical drop in body temperature. Panting heavily, Don returned to break the news to his spouse with the subtlety and tact he’d no doubt perfected in his many years of power-playing. “Phyllis,” he bluntly announced, “Dog Beat says you’re dead.”
    Phyllis did what most of us, I suspect, would have done in that situation. Instead of sensibly placing a hand on her wrist or breast to locate a familiar, contradictory throb, and instead of drawing the obvious Cartesian conclusion from what looked like intense cogitation, she screeched, “What! Let me see!”
    “Bob’s faxing it,” Don told her. “It’ll be here in a minute.” Lowering her voice, Phyllis asked Don what may sound like a strange question: “Dead?” she said. “Dead in what way?” How many ways are there? From Phyllis Abbott’s viewpoint, there must have been two: the usual dull way, for one, and then the really alarming way—dead in dogs. I thought then and still believe that when Phyllis grasped the true nature of the report, she was momentarily relieved to find that the life she was supposed to have departed was merely the biological one. On the pulp pages of Dog Beat, she hadn’t, after all, lost her AKC privileges and, with them, her license to judge. Scary there for a minute, but—whew!—the important part of who Phyllis was, the Judge in Judge Phyllis Abbott, still existed.
    Once recovered from the initial shock, Phyllis passed beyond relief to real anger that none of us succeeded in tempering- While Don went back to the resort’s office to get the fax of Dog Beat, Ginny, unasked, fetched a small medicinal dose of brandy for Phyllis, who tasted it, made a face, thanked Ginny, and drained the glass. Eric Grimaldi reminded Phyllis that only a few years earlier, the AKC Gazette, too, had listed a judge as deceased and had then had to report the mistake.
    “This is not the Gazette we’re talking about!” Phyllis had indignantly replied, as if it were one thing to find herself reputably, if falsely, demised in the Gazette ’s prestigious pages, but quite another to discover herself shamefully defunct in the scandal-ridden sheets of Dog Beat.
    In unwitting testimony to his genuine efficiency and organizational ability, Don Abbott soon returned bearing not only the fax of the entire offending issue, minus the ads, but ten neatly collated and stapled photocopies that