Black Ribbon

main house in search of a telephone so that I could call Leah, make sure that Kimi was all right, and issue dozens of warnings about hazards to dogs that I’d failed to mention in the countless diatribes on the subject that I’d been delivering almost nonstop since my decision to entrust Kimi to my cousin’s care.
    The door of my cabin opened onto a deck that faced the lake. Originally, I thought, the cabin must have been a single unit with an old-fashioned screened porch. When decks came in vogue, did bugs go out? But the deck was bigger than the porch must have been; it extended about ten feet toward the lake and wrapped itself across the front of the cabin and around the sides, where it ended in stairs. The effect was chalet-like and spacious; the wooden railing that divided the deck in half left plenty of room on both sides for twin sets of red-painted Adirondack chairs and big pots of scarlet geraniums in garish bloom. On the side of the deck that wasn’t mine, a vaguely familiar-looking, round-headed man was sitting in one of the chairs doodling on legal pad and talking intently into a portable phone. I couldn’t help overhearing.
    He spoke impatiently. “No,” he said. “That was in the Board’s modified recommendation. This was in the Ad Hoc Committee on Committees recommendations. Their own Delegate Committee presented the whole thing in full.” English? A dialect thereof. AKC, actually, which is a kind of reverse Mahlemut. Remember Mahlemut? Succinct. Not so AKC. I understood every word he said, and if you did, too, well, God help us both. If you didn’t, don’t let it bother you. Except to the extent that the man was discussing the politics of the nation’s largest dog registry, he wasn’t talking about dogs at all. He wasn’t looking at dogs, either. From the long, narrow dock that stretched out into the lake directly in front of my cabin, the Chesapeake bitch I’d noticed earlier took an energetic dive into the water. Rowdy’s feet sounded on the deck. His tags jingled. The bitch was as good a Chesapeake as Rowdy was a malamute. Even when Rowdy wagged his tail and rested his big, handsome head on the railing that divided the deck, the man’s eyes never left his legal pad.
    “Rowdy, this way.” I patted my thigh and shortened the leash. “Let’s go call Leah.”
    The Mooselookmeguntic Four Seasons Resort Lodge and Cabins occupied the shores of a deep cove. Viewed from the lake, the buildings consisted of the main lodge, a vast two-story log cabin with low, motellike wings; and double rows of small cabins along the lake shore on both sides. From that watery perspective, the long dock by my cabin was to the left of the lodge, directly in front of which was a long, narrow stretch of rocky beach. On the pebbles to the far right of the beach rested ten or twelve upturned canoes painted the same fiery red that brightened the doors and window trim of the buildings. Gaudy geraniums bloomed in pots on the decks and in baskets that hung from the eaves of the unscreened porch °f the main house. Each double row of little cabins consisted of six set directly on the water with another six staggered in back to assure a view of the lake. In the state of Maine, and Perhaps elsewhere, the distinction carries considerable economic and social weight. Right on the water is definitely the Place to be; a mere view is worse than second best because glimpsing the lake or the ocean from an aqueously disadvantaged spot requires the viewer to take in the superior places of those who can afford to be right on the water, and the result is, of course, envy, jealousy, and spite far worse than any landlocked, no-view vacation spot could possibly engender.
    “Right on the water,” a woman spat. “I don’t call this right on the water.” In her left hand was a doughnut. She gave it a vicious bite. Her right fist gripped the boxy black-plastic handle of a retractable lead. With no regard for the hefty yellow male Lab at the other end of the lead, she shook her fist at the cabin from which Rowdy and I had emerged. Her gesture thus encompassed us as well. “That’s right on the water.” The woman bore so remarkable a physical resemblance to an obese bulldog that I must have stared at her. From the official bulldog standard: “heavy, thick-set, low-slung body, massive short-faced head, wide shoulders, and sturdy limbs.” With regard to temperament, however, the standard goes on to specify an “equable and