Rachel Alexander 03 - A Hell of a Dog

can of Pedigree
    Choice Cuts that he was trying to swab out with his tongue.
    “Leave it,” I told him, getting up almost as slowly as Jimmy’s old man and walking over to where he was. I hadn’t eaten, and it was catching up with me. Maybe there’d be something for me in the trash as well. And indeed there was.
    Under the morning’s paper and a wad of tissues, I found what Dashiell had been sniffing. I took a plastic Baggie out of my pocket and slipped it over my hand, the way I do when I have to pick up after Dashiell outside. Then I carried the wastebasket over to the window seat, where there was the most light. Reaching in, I picked up what my dog had discovered—two used condoms, one of them broken.
    I walked back into Rick’s bathroom and rechecked those towels. Three of them were pretty damp, as if they had been used after a shower—or two. One was dry, but the middle of it felt as if it had been starched. According to the Young Detective’s Handbook, that meant it had probably been spread out under someone’s cute little tochis in order to keep the sheets clean.
    I wondered who his companion had been; someone, I hoped, who used birth control pills; someone, it seemed, who didn’t find Rick’s fastidiousness as big a turnoff as I did.
    “So you’re perfect?” my mother used to say. “Life is about compromise,” she’d say if she were here.
    My grandmother Sonya, made practical by a childhood of poverty, would have had a comment, too. Nifter, shmifter , a leben macht er? she might have added. What difference does it make as long as he makes a living?
    No matter the cost, my family only wanted me to be married, to have someone to take care of me, as if I were not a woman but an invalid. I wondered if Mrs. Shelbert’s family had felt the same way.
    Then I stood in Rick Shelbert’s bathroom, thinking about
    Freud. Not the man, the dog. What an odd thing it was for such a tidy person to have chosen a slobbering heavy shedder for a pet. It hadn’t been an accident, a dog he’d purchased on impulse at the pet shop in the mall. He worked with dogs for a living. He had to know what it would be like to live with a Saint Bernard. Was his choice simply a testimony to how bonded we humans are to the canine species, that what we would never consider allowing in another person’s behavior, we patiently accept from our dogs, and have been doing so, according to the latest study, for approximately 135,000 years? Even if dogs were slow learners and not the clever opportunists I thought them to be, that was sufficient time to practice not only helping in the hunt, warming the sleeping area, and protecting the cave, but manipulative skills as well. Speaking of which, I heard Dashiell summoning me from the bedroom.
    I went quickly to see if he had made another find. He had. There he was, my hero, sitting in the closet, barking at a twenty-pound sack of kibble.



IT WAS HIS HEART

    Heaving Rick’s room, I went on to frisk Cathy’s, then caught the very end of her talk. After two and a half hours, the puppies she was working with could have earned their livings doing TV commercials. In fact, one of the things I’d learned was that Sky was the Huffy T-shirt border collie. Cathy had five of the shirts with her, though I hadn’t seen her wearing any so far. On them Sky was airborne catching a Frisbee; sailing over a fence; staring down a huddled mass of sheep; carrying a tennis ball in his mouth; and on the last one, doing agility weave poles. He certainly was a clever border collie.
    I also discovered, through perspicacious detective work, that Sky had a dozen tennis balls, all mint scented—and those were just the ones that had been packed for the trip—that he shed as profusely as a Samoyed in spring, or fall, come to think of it; that he ate organic dog food; and that his mistress wore underpants made from undyed, bleach-free organic cotton, not a pair of skimpy silk bikinis in sight, leopard or otherwise. “You’re going to believe what you’re told?” Frank used to say. “Find another way to earn a living.”
    Two people from a New Jersey shelter and six breeders were retrieving their now-well-mannered puppies up on the stage, and Cathy was standing at the edge of the apron answering questions. I walked up onstage, petted a few of the puppies, and handed Cathy her room key. She slipped it into her jacket pocket as she kept answering questions and handing out her business card, too absorbed in