The Wicked Flea

same behavior which was the cause of the original complaints! Some people are never satisfied. Watch out! If dogs are banned from parks, people will be next! –
LIONEL BROWN
NEWTON HIGHLANDS
     
    As it was, the jolting blasts of air horns and personal alarm devices kept interrupting the harmony of man, woman, and dog. No sooner did the joggers resume jogging, the walkers walking, the dogs frolicking, and the mommies and daddies chatting, than someone just had to go and try out one of the damned noisemakers. The most active experimenters with the gadgets were the adult human males, who seemed determined to support the stereotype that men are no more than large preadolescent boys. Two outwardly mature men kept miming a quick-draw contest with their air horns. Or, maybe they were reenacting the gunfight at the OK Corral. Miming was at least silent. The shrieks of the personal alarms were, if anything, worse than the sick-cow blasts of the horns.
    “It’s a good thing for Quest that he’s a little hard of hearing,” Ceci said. “But the other dogs! Their poor ears! Men! They’re nothing but little boys.”
    “Where did all these things come from?” I asked. Boston is, of course, on the Atlantic Ocean, and the Charles River, which empties into Boston Harbor, has lots of small-boat traffic. Even so, the marinas and marine-supply shops are mainly in the seacoast towns north and south of Boston, not in the western suburbs. As it turned out, someone had bought a whole case of air horns for almost nothing at a gigantic discount store and handed them out to all the dog walkers. The personal alarms had come from electronics shops, both local and online.
    Wilson’s corgi, Llio, had her ears flattened. She looked miserable. “This is misguided,” Wilson said reasonably. “Among other things, if the dogs get used to the noise, it won’t stop fights. And Pia had to go and get a personal alarm after what happened with the, uh, sick individual in the ski mask. But what good’s it going to do now?”
    “Crying wolf,” his wife agreed. She again wore a running outfit—cream-colored tights and layers of sweatshirts. “Although I must say that I’m not sure these personal alarms do any good, anyway, in terms of personal safety. What if no one hears them? Or hears them and doesn’t do anything? A dog might be afraid of the sound, but a flasher?”
    “Low curs, aren’t they?” Douglas joked.
    Oddly, Pia didn’t seem to object to his making light of her unhappy encounter. On the contrary, she smiled flirtatiously at Douglas. “You and your puns, Douglas,” she said.
    “It isn’t a laughing matter,” Wilson protested.
    “I’ve recovered,” his wife told him. “The police said these sickos usually just do what they do. They get off on exposing themselves. They aren’t rapists. If they were, they’d—”
    “Pia, enough,” Wilson ordered. “We know what they’d do. It’s obvious. Enough.”
    Pia flushed. “Would you not talk to me like I’m a dog?”
    Wilson apologized and went on say, “I didn’t mean it to sound like that.”
    “Well, that’s what you always say to Llio. Enough! Not that she listens.”
    “Llio listens better than Zsa Zsa does,” her husband countered. “Not that that’s saying a lot. Oh, God! Here she comes.”
    A glance showed Sylvia emerging from the woods. Zsa Zsa was waddling beside her.
    “Rowdy and I are going to disappear,” I said, “and Ceci, I think you should get Quest away from here, too.”
    “Don’t you have your—?”
    “We were lucky last time. It might not work, especially... let’s just go.”
    Ceci being the upbeat, if somewhat unrealistic, person she was, said, “Well, yes, it probably is time for us to head home. You have work to do, I’m sure, Holly dear, and we’ve all had our exercise for the day, haven’t we, Quest?”
    Although our exercise had consisted of traversing the short distance from the car to the middle of the field, I didn’t argue. Ceci believed so fervently in the benefits of fresh air that she considered outdoor breathing to be a vigorous aerobic activity. I intended to have a talk with her about the importance of maintaining muscle tone in dysplastic dogs and to prod her to walk Quest on the paths in the park. But not now.
    I cut her good-byes short. As she, Rowdy, Quest, and I made our way toward my Bronco, I checked on Zsa Zsa’s whereabouts. Sylvia and the golden had covered about half the distance from the woods to