Rachel Alexander 03 - A Hell of a Dog

can’t imagine why,” Chip said.
    “Because he promised them the magic pill,” I said, “a way they could get what they were after without actually working for it. Isn’t that why the lottery works?”
    Chip leaned across me to say something to Woody.
    “Shhh, Beryl’s speaking. I want to hear her.” I punched him in the arm for emphasis, the way I used to in the old days, before he spoiled our friendship by getting divorced and reconciled.
    “Do you know what Sam is going to do about his time slot? ” Woody asked.
    Beryl was showing a slide of a Rottweiler herding sheep.
    “She’ll probably ask one of us to fill it,” I said. “You wouldn’t have a problem with that, would you?” I asked him.
    “Not as long as I don’t have to electronically stimulate any dogs.”
    “Maybe she’ll add another panel,” I said. “Wasn’t Alan speaking about problem correction? We could do a problem panel, take questions from the students. There’s one on Saturday, for pet owners. But we could do this one for professionals, you know, talk about client problems as well as dog problems.“
    “Sure,” Woody said, “why not a panel, the three of us and some foodies. Why stop at one death?”
    “Sam will come up with something. She just needs to spend some time with Elizabeth first.”
    “I hope she dumped that damn shock collar,” Chip said.
    “I packed Alan’s stuff,” I said.
    Woody and Chip turned to look at me in the light of the next slide. It was a gazehound, and Beryl was saying something about the difference between dogs that work closely with man, genetically predisposed to taking direction, and dogs that hunt in packs, working off their instincts rather than instruction and therefore less cooperative as training subjects.
    “I gave Sam a hand, that’s all. I packed Alan’s stuff so she wouldn’t have to do it. She was nice enough to get Beau out, try to calm him down. And she’s the one dealing with Elizabeth. It was the least I could do.”
    “And?” Woody asked. “What about the collar?”
    “I packed it.”
    “Oh, Jesus,” he said.
    “What would you have done?” I said loud enough to get shushed by the mountain of a woman two rows in front of us. “Throw it out with the trash the maid was collecting in the hall? Don’t you figure there are more of them back at the kennel, should Elizabeth want to continue electrocuting her dog once she sheds her widow’s weeds? Anyway, married couples hardly ever train alike, even in professional families.”
    “Tell me about it,” Chip said, and when I turned to look at him, his brow was furrowed, and he seemed for the moment to be far away.
    “I mean, sometimes you can’t even get a husband and wife to use the same vocabulary with the dog. Anyway, Elizabeth will have other things on her mind,” I said, looking back at the screen, “at least for a while.”
    “So that in testing the intelligence of a dog not genetically attuned to working with a human handler,” Beryl was saying, “what are you actually testing? If the dog is not prone to being cooperative with humans in a work situation, in a partnership, as it were, then why would he care about the artificial tests devised by some scientist with no knowledge of breed differences?” That’s when I zeroed in on the back of Audrey’s head, the little black pug looking over her shoulder, her bug eyes watching everyone watch the slide show. Even if neither of them had been in Phoenix, suppose Alan had changed his mind and accepted Audrey’s generous offer of a psychic reading on Beau, perhaps noticing the blue-black shine of her hair or the wonderful roundness of her tight little derriere. So then I sat there trying to figure out if that wonderful little derriere was the size that would fit into the leopard bikinis I had stuffed into my pocket before leaving Alan’s room. From there it was a hop, skip, and a jump to wonder how that little tramp—how anyone, no matter how desperate— could go to bed with a shock collar trainer.
    I was dying to ask at least one of my companions that very question, but instead I merely slid lower into my seat and tried to concentrate on Beryl’s talk, suddenly seeing her younger, saying these same things, on the tapes I had at home.
    ‘That the Lab is harder and cooler than the Golden, that the—” Beryl was saying.
    ‘They’re not going to get this,” Chip whispered. “It’s too subtle.”
    “Maybe it will start them noticing things they